Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Equipment Score!

I've been searching for something to use as "easy-access flooring" for the greenhouse which will have a tilapia tank under the floor (see recent posts in this thread - the one with the trampoline-parts extension), and of course I always prefer whatever I end up using to be "free", so I'm thrilled to be able to say "The Cinemark in Plano on the Dallas North Tollway just remodeled one of their theaters", which provided the answer to my prayers.

I was talking the back roads home one evening last week (the tollway was jammed to a halt and the weather was turning bad), when I noticed a huge pile of construction trash behind the theater, so I stopped to speak with whomever was in charge. Both the theater manager and the construction contracting company site project manager gave me permission to take anything I wanted from their mountain of debris. And believe me, with my wife's help, we did! Several trailer loads over a number of days!

In addition to a whole lot of good lumber, they threw out a large amount of one-foot-wide, slotted connecting steel catwalks of various lengths ranging from 3 to 13 feet, with most being around 8 or 9 feet long.



Although I intend to use these as flooring, I've temporarily thrown down some to allow the yard to heal, since I've trudged this particular pathway into mud.



Since it has been raining (and worse), I made a five-foot-wide temporary bridge out of five connected catwalks (this picture shows two additional lengths, but those are intended as flooring and I mainly threw them down here to act as railings in case my overactive children decided to fall into the creek.

Good news: They didn't. Or at least haven't. Yet.



Cinemark also discarded a lot of strong, slotted box-steel (I don't know the proper name, that's just what I've heard it called).



I was also able to obtain several large sections of the silvered movie screen they're replacing, but I don't have a picture of that available at the moment as it is all folded/wadded up into a large pile on my front porch. When the weather passes, I'll stretch it out and see how much of it will make for a good shade screen, which is my main intention for the stuff.

I decided to move my under-construction Dallas greenhouse about 7 feet to the West, which is one of my typical "gosh I wish I'd thought of this earlier" sort of things. It will be easier to build the foundation frame and to level it right next to the fence, with the added bonus of no longer having to contend with being all up in the Crepe Myrtle tree on the trampoline side of things.

Since I'm doing this alone, I decided the easiest way to move it - shy of disassembling everything - was to put it on rails (the new box steel beams from Cinemark). They were easy to put into place since I am capable of lifting each corner of the greenhouse high enough to slip a rail under, and once there I was able to slide the whole thing with a gentle push.



It moves so easily now I'm tempted to leave the rails in place once everything else is complete and it is level. One problem, however, is that I don't have a good answer to the question "Why?" if that's someone's reply when I say "I put my greenhouse on rails!"

Because seriously, once it is in place I can't see myself really needing to slide it back and forth roughly its own width, no matter how cool I think that would be. Especially after I add all the waterworks and grow beds. No, I think the rails are going to be temporary.

Still, they worked great for moving the frame, so I thought I'd share.

I was able to get the greenhouse leveled (well, mostly) to the point where I can begin installing the actual steel footings once - and this is key - once I end up on site with the correct size bolts. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to reach into the bolt bag and find the only ones I have are either too big to go through the mounting brackets, or far too small to be of any use. Ah well, my own fault.

Anyways, I was able to secure the greenhouse with enough random boards and concrete blocks temporarily so that it shouldn't fall down until I can get back there with the proper hardware.



Once the greenhouse is firmly supported, I'll be able to cut and place the catwalk flooring. I'll also use a considerably stronger crossbeam than shown here.

Update: Many developments, nothing completed (is anything ever really completed?).

Thanks to our dear friend Craigslist, I was able to acquire four pre-plumbed IBCs for free from someone who was getting out of the fish-raising hobby. That said, I now can probably give away a few of my un-plumbed (i.e. "normal") IBCs that I had not yet put into my systems and now won't need to.


So... If you're in the DFW area and need a tote or two or three or maybe four, please let me know. I don't feel like charging for them, but I may need to ask your help moving my new four into position because I've wrecked up my shoulder and throwing these totes around alone is sometimes beyond me.

Also, the city of Dallas has decided to replace both the sewer and fresh water systems of the neighborhood where my southern system is located, which apparently involves a TON of roadwork. They've got these environmental runoff booms made of shredded wood stuffed inside of what looks like the same sort of plastic netting I use as bird netting, and the project's foreman is letting me keep them when he's done with them. I plan on turning them into vertical planters just as an experiment.

The picture above is of just a portion of them when they were dropped off pristine. It has now been a few weeks, and the foreman has already let me take about 8 of them home. I've rinsed them and will be planting and hopefully hanging them up this week, and will take pictures when that happens.

I'm seriously thinking of introducing chickens and quail into my aquaponics system, and since I typically approach things out of order and without thinking them all the way through, I've already got six chickens and a few quail. (I plan on getting more quail once I construct a non-lethal cage for them, since their first cage turned out to be anything but...)

One of my thoughts - which I'd appreciate tips/feedback/criticism on - is to take my busted 1000 gallon tank (the blue one), cut doors and windows into it, and turn it into a chicken coop.


I'd have a metal screen "floor" (landscape/hardware-fabric screening), under which water would run into and out of the tank to continuously flush out their debris. It may even make sense to put a catfish or two in there, under the floor. Up in the coop itself I'd use either plastic buckets or cut-up small barrels as the roosting beds.

The biggest nightmare I foresee here is trying to plumb it into my current sump, which will probably be difficult, and the idea of digging another sump gives me hives.

I do need to do something, however, because of the six chickens, only the two largest (Rhode Island Reds) currently roost in a proper coop, while the other four (three Buff Orpintons and a Speckled Sussix) spend their nights in a temporary coop I threw together out of IBC tote parts and some chicken wire.


I know the people who run gardenpool.org have chickens as part of their overall aquaponic system, so my understanding it basically "it can be made to work". Does anyone know of any drawbacks or health hazards (other than the obvious ones we all deal with doing this sort of thing) that I may have overlooked?

Here's a picture my eldest took of the four "little" chickens (they should start laying in October), which my girls have named Parrot, Twinkie, Princess Buttercup, and Chicken.

Here's one of the Reds (I can no longer tell them apart in photos although it is easy in person because Ruby is very quiet and Rosetta never shuts up).


One thing I found out, which I confess was not really surprising, is that chickens love catfish!

Last week one of the neighborhood kids (same one who last year helped my daughter rescue a hundred or so baby catfish that went over a local dam during the rain and got trapped in about an inch of water) dropped off a big jug of - you can probably guess - another set of dozens of baby catfish, which I can only assume she caught under similar circumstances.

The jug-o-catfish was waiting on our back porch when we got home, and had apparently been there just slightly too long because although the vast majority were still alive, we had probably around 8 to 10 dead ones. I tossed one to a chicken, who snatched it up and ran off pursued by the others, so you would be safe in assuming that's how I disposed of the other dead ones as well.

The rest went into an IBC tote I'd previously filled to use for a completely different purpose (as yet unaccomplished), and they seem to be doing nicely although I REALLY need to hook a filter or grow-bed up to that thing.

Regarding the enviro-boom vertical gardening idea... although I would prefer to use a round tank, that's not currently an option.
Therefore my plan is to hang a bunch of these things up:

And have them drip down into my square catchment tank:

over and over and over etc.

I'm very sorry to say the heat killed my two Rhode Island Reds yesterday afternoon. This took me completely by surprise. The wife & kids heard a hawk outside, and remembering how they slaughtered our ducks awhile back, we gathered up the chickens and put them away. They're normally outside running around during the day.

Well, the ones that currently live in the temporary IBC-tote based coop are fine, but the two that lived in a "real" store-bought coop died within a few hours, and given that they've lived in that coop just fine for many months I can only assume it was the heat that killed them.

Oh well.

Sorry to hear about the chickens Shelgeyr.

I'm raising my first batch (6 different breeds) and I had to get a mister going quite a bit this year for mine. Got up to 105 F (40.5 C) one time this summer.

Shows you how stupid I can be sometimes - the idea of rigging misters didn't even occur to me, and I have some in my shed somewhere!

Thanks for jarring that particular memory - my other chickens are sure to thank you once I get the misters hooked up and running.

I've given up on ever fixing my busted blue 1000-gallon tank, not because any problem with IT (I've been assured it is easily repairable, and it certainly looks to be), but because I just know I'll never get around to it. And Ii'm tired of trying to sell it.

So I'm giving it away for free.

Please see this thread if interested:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=25942

No strings attached.

I should probably mention that I still am trying to give away four IBC totes.

Any local interest would be greatly appreciated!

There is NOTHING WRONG with these totes - I picked up four pre-plumbed ones off Craigslist a short while back and now have un-plumbed spares a'plenty.

If you could take the four totes AND the 1Kgal tank you've be my hero, but that's not required. Taking what you can is OK.

New equipment score!

I've been looking for something to roof my, for want of a better term, "chicken yard" with in order to protect them from the hawks, and I've moved their coop into the same greenhouse that holds my aquaponics system (except for the catfish, but I will get them moved inside before the weather turns really cold), but was not looking forward to purchasing a lot more chickenwire.

Fortunately, I noticed the day before yesterday that one of our local high schools had (finally) decided to stop mending their batting cage nets and to just replace them with new ones. I asked permission to pull the old ones out of the dumpster, because they're massive.

Just to give you an idea of their size, here's the new ones already installed:



And here's part of the net (I'd already cut off a large green netting section and stuffed it into my trailer) that frankly took me well over an hour to load. Those things are HEAVY!!!



My plan now is to use the green netting (not shown above) to roof the chicken yard, and the black netting to cover the outside of my aquaponics/chicken coop greenhouse, in order to hopefully help mitigate some of the massive wind problems I had last winter.

Might make good filter material as well. Good score.