Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Good luck with the perch. If you do as well as you have with the trout & barra I'm sure it will be fantastic.

How many watts does your Oase eco-pump use?

The eco-pump 16000 uses 130 watts, so it is really quite economical to run 24/7....much better than the pool pump at least. The ornamental fish were just an aesthetic purchase, a raised pipe would also do the job but because we still want to spend time at the pool we wanted it to look reasonable too

Well I didn't throw it traditionally as I would in a stream I just spread it out and dropped it straight down - the catfish well at least the smaller ones were able to get under the weights it caught all the tilapia and sunfish in two or three drops - I'd practice throwing in your drive way and get a net sized appropriately for the pond - I normally use either a 6-8' net train my kids on a 4' which might be the biggest you can do on that smaller side - are the inside walls of your tank smooth? If so it wouldn't matter if you hit the sides - however if you have a pump or a SLO that could be a problem

I just finished reading your thread. Wonderful use of your pool as a fish tank. Great fish production. I use a 1100 gallon stock tank for my tank and don't mind getting in it ever once in a while but not deep enough to swim in, only 24" deep. My water temps do not get warm enough to suite me. I did not have any luck at salting more than 3 ppt. I think you need to set up a GB of some sort to help with the filtration and to help with the Nitrite problems. Unless the UV system is causing the problem you should have plenty of NitrAtes to grow stuff and would be a natural answer to removal of the Nitrite and Nitrates. Besides more growing space for more veggies.

In go the perch, via the red bucket! 48 very tiny little fish....but they will grow (provided they don't get lost in 10,000 litres!!!)

In go the next lot of perch, quite a bit bigger and well and truly eating size by the end of summer. The one issue we had with changing to perch was that we may not have fish to eat from this summer season while we wait for the fingerlings to grow, however that issue is now solved by buying bigger perch to go with the titchy ones. Once we get them all going, the plan will be to just buy fingerlings every year to keep replenishing the stock.....that's the plan anyway!

Cool! Do you think you will still do trout in the winter?

Hi Faye, the plan is not to do trout again in winter, not this season anyway. We would really like to try the perch for 18 months. Although we will really, really miss the fun of the trout, there are a couple of advantages in the perch for a swimming pool we would like to check out....
1. They will eat the algae (which you can see in the picture) which will make it much nicer for swimming. We have often struggled with this building up in summer, right when we want a clean pool.
2. We won't have to make sure we get every fish out when the temperature drops/rises before we put the next lot in. We have worked out a fairly effective method for this, but it is a big job with an odd shaped pool. We have started with the two sizes for this year to kick it off, then it will be much easier to keep adding perch fingerlings every year, and just catch the bigger fish as we want them, year round (we hope!!).

Another experiment......we may change our minds yet!

Did a bit of a yabbie sort today....and found loads if babies...about 1 cm long! Now the perch fingerlings are in the pool, we hae put the larger yabbies in that IBC now, so hopefully the babies will be left alone to grow....and grow......

Not if they're still in the perch tank...

Well, so far the perch are going well! They are great to swim with, not being skittish at all, and are eating well.

We caught two for dinner the other day, and they were 530 and 580 grams, after starting around 300g in November.

The fingerlings we put in have grown very quickly too, and look to be around 200- 300g now.

So far so good!

Very nice indeed, how are you going to cook them?

Nice fish. How did you catch them in such a big pool??

I would use my ultralight rod/reel outfit with a small soft-plastic on it lol

Faye- just filleting and pan frying.....

Mantis- we used fishing rods. First we tried mozzarella cheese which they particularly liked, but they kept taking it off the hook, so then we used prawn bait which was easier to keep on the hook and they loved it!

We could have kept going but just wanted the two for dinner so stopped!