Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

ooooh! go Julie!

Chrissy, why don't you start your own thread with pics and all so we can help you. Welcome, by the way.

Thanks for the welcome,
Will start a thread soon with pics of the tank

Hard to get anything else done when that little voice keeps crying
"aquaponics,"

Hi Julie.

so when you going to get the other 996 perch?

Nah, put in however many you want. All the large volume of water means is that it will take a while for the nutrients to build up, after that it goes back to the nutes in VS nutes out.

Use the lowest of the three figures (fish-water-plants) as the base for your ratio.

Obviously you're not going to stock 24 ton of SP in your pool (60kg per KL)

So if you plan to have say 240 kg of fish (when grown) then use the "virtual" volume of 4,000 Lt of water, which gives you 8,000L of grow bed............using joels golden formula (you can scale up as your fish grow, or play with the figures a little, thats half the fun! clear as mud?

just think nutes in (feed) to nutes out (amount of plants)

If you're water has algae in it then you invariably have nutrients in the water already, float some rafts with lebanese water cress in it. Joel has had success using them to clear his water before, they grow QUICK and are yummy.

I'm currently running my system at zero detectable nitrates (lots of plants not many fish) yet i'm still getting 3 or four tommies ripening every day plus good growth on the herbs.

I know that you probably don't like the sound of using the existing pool pump due to its power, but consider the following

1) the amount of fresh veggies that you'll be growing

2) fresh fish

3) scaleability up to whatever size you want

4) the fact that in its infancy you system will only require the pump to be run for VERY short intervals, from memory it was under 1KW, so we're talking about 16Cents per hour i'm sure that say 50 cents per day is cool

Use what you have and work around it.............place one or two blue barrels on the top 'ledge" where the fence is, time the pump to fill these barrels and then let the water drain out back to the pool slowly giving you airation. when you add some grow beds use the barrels as header tanks to feed the grow beds so the pump only turns on every hour or so for a minute.

You could fill these two barrels with some gravel and stick a couple of trees (lemon?) in them, thus giving you solids filtration, bio-media for the bacteria, and a cool talking point.

Steve

Checked the ph on the weekend, not good, 8.2! I think my fish are still alive, although I can't see them through all the green murkiness. at least they're not floating (for the momment anyway). How do I get the ph down in 40000 l of water?
Nitrites, nitrates and ammonia, all 0ppm.

With great difficulty Julie. This is going to be a major issue for you using such a big water volume. Have you got a very large and productive lemon trea - sorry.

Julie,
As you get more bio-load into the system, the pH will naturally drift down, but that will take at least several months; probably longer in such a large volume of water.

One natural way to lower pH is to add driftwood. (In your case, maybe a whole tree's worth ? ) Make sure it is clean and untreated wood. Perhaps there's a nearby forest where you could find some large downed tree limbs? This will also take time, but the natural tannins will release from the wood to lower the pH.

The pH will be high because of the algae. Do you have grow beds running yet? You need to get something other than algae to use some of the nutrients in the pool.

Someone posted here a while ago about using organic straw (barley or wheat, I can't remember) to reduce algae. I think it was floated in the pool and it somehow got rid of the algae. Here is the thread.

Nova

VERY good, nova!

i was just about to start typing the same!

Jules, if you want to confirm that the algae is the cause then take a PH reading early in the morning (just before sunrise) and then another just before sunset.

If its the algae (which it will be) then the readings will swing quite a lot, maybe even from the 6's to the 8's .

Its been covered before, but at night the algae consumes O2 from the water and increases the CO2, hence carbonic acid. During the day the process is reverse due to photosynthesis.

Best way for the moment i think is to get some panda plasic from a hydro store and cover the pool with it for a few weeks.

also, if you don't have any gravel beds and bacteria in the system (well, yo will have bacteria on all the surfaces) i find that the algae will take hold easier due to there not being any competition.

I helped fill a 4ft aquarium with water, a sand base and one convict cichlid 7 days ago in preperation for an AP setup (steve&ange). 7 days later and the water is a murky green despite virtually NO food. Am tipping it will clear up when we add the 20Lt biobucket seeded from my system and start pumping water around.

Has anyone in Melb bought gal grow beds, we're thinking that long term these might be our best bet. The earthworks with the sleepers might take us forever. I've rang about half the places in the yellow pages, only one said he could do it but priced me at $420 for 1.2m diam and 30cm high. We need about three! I'll post photos of how we want to set it up with water flow etc. when I get my scanner working. Saw my fish last night, hard to see in all that green. They've grown and they look happy. Checked ph last night, same as this morning before sunrise, getting on toward 8.4!

I just had a look at this web site, and posted a link on the "links" page. Well worth a look if you havent seen it before:

http://kilk.com/pond/

A very nice looking pool conversion.
Julie is there any chance that we could have more regular updates on your project?

Thanks for the link, it looks amazing. I have trouble enough finding time to keep my house clean! Sooo, updates on the project would gladly be forthcoming if I had some! Well, still sussing out the grow beds, there's an area next to the pool where we are thinking of putting up to 4 or 5 grow beds. I think I've found a supplier that is reasonably priced. Initial capital is always a problem though, so slows down the process. I'll post some pics of our plans etc when I work out how to use our scanner!! Hopefully things will quieten down a little for us in a month and we can find some time to concentrate on AP.
Julie

Found some more pictures:

woops, missed this one