Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ryan I must admit I was convinced... at the start.
It is probably one of the best photoshops I have seen but after some careful pixel by pixel analysis I came to the conclusion that the picture was doctored...
I am no longer convinced pinchy is about 20m high...not anymore.

Ohh the shame!

My new BYAP pump arrived today

My fish just wanted to say 'thank you BYAP' (I speak fish ) because they are now getting fed again

Also i have had a massive outbreak of snails. Killed around 30 this morning. Stupid loaches dont even eat the snails any more

Yabbies love em Ryan!

I just throw them straight in and 1 yabbie will devour an entire snail in about 5 minutes. It pays to clean the shell out afterwards though. If your keen enough you could break the shell off first. But I enjoy watching the live kill..

These snails dont seem to get any bigger than 5mm across.

I dont seem to remember seeing any snails in the yabbie tank... might have to swap the fish and the yabbie for a few months.

yeah snails are crap, and so are loaches at killing them
I used to have a few quadrillion of them, when I changed tanks only a few migrated and they seem to have dissapeared with a gravel change..

I had so many you could see the gravel moving like it was alive. I would put in lettuce to catch them and in the morning throw out several hundred that were on the leaf.

Stoopid snails

I was keeping on top of them by crushing the ones i could reach everyday. Then i chucked the loaches in there and they seemed to disappear. So i thought the loaches were eating them. I had read they were a good fish to help control the population.

In the last few days though the population has exploded. So back to the squishing me thinks.

maybe try only feeding your fish once every 3 days or so.
Snail population explosions always happen after overfeeding.
I only every feed my aquarium fish every few days now... just because Im slack and cheap

It actually all started when i stopped feeding!

When my pump died a few days ago i stopped feeding because there was only maybe a few hours where i would take the pump from my ibc and run it in my aquarium to filter the water. It will be interesting over the next few days now the pump is back whether the population decreases.

Some very exciting news about the fish tank!

But first the boring stuff

I have been working on an expansion board for the rapsberry pi which will be the basis of the datalogger i am hoping to make while i wait for the RaspPi to arrive. All it has at the moment is water temp, ambient temp as well as tank level via a ping sensor. I have the water temp sensor in the drain of my top tank which should be the coolest part of the water and the ping sensor on the lower tank or my sump

Here is a graph of a water change i did. I haven't bothered doing the maths to convert the ping sensor to tank level, that will be done on the RaspPi, so the results are inverted and just a distance in mm to the water. So the first dip or 'peak' is where i turned off my pump. That is basically a full tank. Then you can see the water level drop as i syphon water out and the second 'peak' as i fill it up. Then the water level drops and levels out when i turn the pump back on. You can see the water temp drop as the cold water circulates through the system and slowly warms back up as the heater does its thing.



Nothing too interesting or exciting but i thought i would share.

Now for the exciting stuff.

Werdna was good enough to give me two female bristlenose catfish as well as a but load of shrimp, some duckweed and a couple of pumps. The plan is to breed the bristlenose and the shrimp and sell to the local fish shop which they seemed happy to buy from me. Hopefully i will cover some of the expenses of having the aquariums and AP stuff

Photos! Here are a couple of shrimp. For reference the hole in the wood as about 5mm across.



Here is one of the pretty ladies



Here is the lucky man. This photo shows how bad the tank is



Here he is checking out his new love pad. It was all buried and looking nice, but he had other ideas.



Another shot of one of the laides.



A massive thank you to Werdna for the fish. I have been checking the breeding cave almost every day for eggs

tank looks awesome, play some nice music Im sure they will get it on soon enough

Nice work on the sensors, can you post a pic of the exp board schematic ?

Good to see they made it
Leave him alone and dont shine torches or anything at him, it stops them breeding.
You will know when they have eggs as he will be fanning his fins, it is really obvious when they do it.

Wait till the females start looking fat then lower the temp to around 21 degrees.
A water change cant hurt either.

Then wait 3 days.

What is quite funny is about 5 mins ago i was telling a friend of mine that i was going to have to play them Barry White at night time for them.

The schematic is nothing special, just a couple of DS18B20's, a DS1307 and a ping sensor all tied together with a propeller. I will try and get a photo up for you later.

Werdna, he has been fanning his fins already. He sticks his head into the cave, tail facing out and fans all his fins. Surely it is too soon for there to be eggs? Wish i could shine a torch in there to look!

propeller ?
I was just wondering how you got data off it, if propeller means some kind of micro with serial to your pc....

If he doesnt leave the cave for 3 days he is probably fanning eggs.
They look funny doing it.
Their pelvic fins fan opposite to each other, so when one goes up the other is going down.

Wait till after 3 days and maybe then you can shine a torch in.

I have trained my female catfish's to put out quick