Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello. I just recently stocked my 2 barrel system with 6 goldfish and had a few questions. One, what would be the max stocking of goldfish in a system like this? It's got a 55 gallon barrel cut in half for the growbeds and probably 40ish gallons of water cycling through the FT. Also, I bought API pond pellets to feed them when I purchased them at the petstore and after reading the label when I got home I noticed it said it contained natural zeolite that supposedly reduces ammonia. Should I switch food? You want the ammonia to be broken down to nitrates right? Thanks in advance!

If a system is fully functional, and you have good amount of air stones, they say one fish per 3 gallons of water.

Yes the ammonia is needed for the system to start working. You have the right idea. I used minnows to start my system and it took about 5 weeks for the bacteria to develop. This is not a quick process. And the last thing is, you never have too much air!

Good luck.

The system is already cycled, I did fishless cycling. Ammonia, Nitrites, and Nitrates are reading a pretty steady 0ppm, though the ammonia occasionally reads in between 0-.25ppm. I guess I was mainly wondering if the API pond food would inhibit nitrate production going forward because of the zeolite in it or if it was an insignificant amount to have an effect.