Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I highly recommend diluting your water to get a better idea of where your nitrites are. If you do 50/50 ap water and filtered water, you would double whatever results you get. I ended up diluting to 1/10 th to figure out how high my nitrates were.

So in this case you do disrupt the cycling? if your nitrites are really high?

Just dilute the water in the test kit, not the system.

Don't you have two systems?

One cycled one not?

I'd swap water from one system to the other. If it was me I'd use a aquarium pump (small) to put water into the cycled system and if possible have the cycled system feed into the uncycled one. Altenatively you could put into the cycled system for "a while" and then pump out of the cycled system into the uncycled system for a corresponding "while".

That should process the nitrite pretty quickly and probably cycle your tank faster.

Given that it is winter and you are in Ballarat (or close to) it is probably going to take until spring to really get a brand new system cycled. Whereas a linked old/new system should be up and running relatively (relatively being the operative word*) quickly.

*my water temp is now 11 yours may be a degree or two higher but bacteria growth is still going to be slow.

I think I might do it today or tomorrow, it's bugging me now!


Yeah there are two independent IBC systems, Tank 1 cycled, Tank 2 is in the process. What would happen to Tank 1 if I interchanged the water? Would it be able to cope with the spike in Nitrites? Now it's stable I'm worried I'll muck it up by playing around with it! lol.

Water temps for me have tended to be sitting around the 16 degree mark for the past few weeks (before that they were swinging between 14-16). I expect the temp in the tank will go down now the temperature is starting to drop, it's a forecast 15-16 degrees all week so I'm guessing the tanks will drop a fair bit.

Hmm, ok so I bought the trout today, decided to go for the whole 20 at once but now I'm worried Tank 2 will take longer to finish cycling than I expected it to!

What do you have in your other tank?
20 fingerling trout isn't that much but, yes they will grow quick.

My winter system took 4 weeks to cycle

If you only add water in relatively slowly it won't cause a problem. I don't know how much water your system will hold or what spare gear you have lying around but a 5% water exchange per hour may be enough to give you barely detectable nitrites in systems 1 and will seriously push system 2 along. Then again maybe 10% would be needed



Obviously you lowlanders have things a lot warmer than us hill folk

At 16c you tank 2 system will cycle much sooner than I said before. After all with the TAN going down and the nitrite spike to go down soon it shouldn't take that long. Espeacially if you exchange water between the two systems.

brilliant idea.

My summer greenhouse system had about 1000 litres or more of my other systems AP water and it cycled in 17 days

Sounds like a plan, I've got a spare small pump in the shed that I can use, I'll do it slowly and see how it goes. Thank you!

Anyway, I took my time and slowly acclimated the fish, the majority seem fine, although I noticed watching the video I took that one or two looked a little stunned. Hopefully they will be ok, I covered the tank to just let them chill out so I haven't checked since to see how they are doing, I might pop the camera back in later though.




A very quick photo of one of the fish, they seem nice and healthy. You can get a rough idea of size by comparing it to my hand behind the net. They are so cute!



They seemed to really like hanging out by the shell grit sack, lol.




Thanks for all the replies and feedback folks, muchly appreciated.

Any of yours flashing?

In the video the fish that is vertical on the left of the sack looks dodgy. Barely moving even when knocked about by the other fish. You reckon it's ok?

Not that I have seen, but I didn't spend a long time watching them after they went in as I had to go out for a bit (and return the goldfish to their home too, lol). There are a couple in the video behaving oddly but I didn't see any obvious flashing behavior. I'll be keeping an eye out for it though.


That one and the one on the other side of the sack seemed a bit iffy, with the possibility of one more too. The one on the left did move away after I stopped filming though.

I recorded another video before the sun went down but I have no idea where I put the camera so I haven't had a chance to see how the fish are behaving in the recording. I put it somewhere clever to dry off I'm sure, lol.

From poking my head over the tank they seemed fine, but that doesn't mean there isn't some off sulking in the corner feeling sorry for themselves.

I didn't want to bother them again today, but I couldn't resist so I went down and stuck my head in with a torch. They all seemed active, from what I could see the weird looking ones from the video weren't acting the same. In as much as I couldn't see any of them doing weird things and none hiding/floating/flashing/dancing a merry jig.

I'm hoping it was just some sort of initial shock or something from going into a new tank, but I'll be watching them closely to see what happens.

Cool, fingers crossed they settle happily.