Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ok. So in the last few months I've gone from someone who was "Never going to have pet fish because I have enough animals to take care of thank you very much!" To Miss "Oh I've got the tanks and the pumps and aren't those Cichlids so goddamn pretty..."

It started when I tried to upgrade my daughters' 16L fish tank with a second hand one from Gumtree.

Thought I'd found an amazing bargain when I committed to buying 2 tanks for $80

Don't realize until I had to pick them up that they are 165L and 175L respectively!!!!

Couldn't fit them in our daughters room so "of course" one had to go in hubby and Is bedroom and the other in my office...

So I've been cycling the first tank which is in our bedroom. And researching cichlids...

So the secret apparently with keeping happy cichlids is to overstock. Which means filtration is super important.

I managed to score a 1100 lph Aqua One external canister filter off gumtree for $50

But Nitrates will still be an issue...

So I'm contemplating a pre-tank nitrate filter/vertical garden to remove nitrates from the water before they hit the tank.

Similar to this:



But there'll probably be only one or two lengths of pipe, mounted to the wall, and I'll paint the PVC to match our wall and I'll place the pipes as close as possible.

Pros: (1) more time between water changes.
(2) happier fish

Cons: (1) if this thing overflows I'm going to have a wet bedroom.
(2) if the pump fails I not only have dead fish but possibly dead plants too.

Definitely just putting decorative, shade-tolerant house plants in the pipes. Tossing up between putting scoria in the pipes or just running it as hydroponics.

But I'm guessing a scoria filled pipe will be heaps heavier and will have more blockage issues than straight water?

Yay cichlids! I used to have a 4' tank with pseudotropheus saulosi, they were so much fun to watch. So pretty, and they ended up forming three separate territories - it was awesome watching the dominant males face off at each other at the boundaries and threat-dance. If you get mouth-brooding cichlids (like mine were) they have really high survival rates for their fry, so you'll end up densely stocked even if you don't start that way!

Yay Cichlids!

I'm so impatient to get them - but my tank still hasn't completely cycled.

Do they need tunnels and sand?

The guy at my local fish shop seemed very knowledgeable but when I asked if I needed to put cichlid stones in there and/or sand - he said they didn't need it...

If you want to remove nitrates, you don't need to fill the pipes with scoria. Use plants in some netpots filled with your media of choice. these can be suspended in water filling about half the height of your horizontal pipes. There are a few threads about the technique... including viewtopic.php?f=1&t=25194

Smartest thing I ever did was lay a tarp under my mini indoor system. Despite having the grow beds right above the tank, draining straight down to them, my system failed and I had a flood. YIKES! Fortunately the tarp retained most of it.

It depends on the type of cichlid you're thinking of. There are two main groups of African cichlids, from Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika, a smaller group from Lake Victoria, the West African ones that live in rivers, and a lot of South American cichlids. They've got pretty different requirements in water quality/characteristics and environment between the groups, and then individual species have different behaviours so want different things. South American cichlids generally need soft, acidic water; cichlids from Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika need hard, alkaline water. If you get cichlids from the Mbuna group in Lake Malawi, they live in and around rocks so will want hiding places and sand and caves. If you get cichlids from the Haplochromis group (still from Lake Malawi), they won't care about rocks or caves but will want sand. If you get cichlids from the Utaka group (same lake!), they're open-water swimmers so should be fine in a bare aquarium. My salousis were Mbunas, so we gave them a lot of rocks and ornaments and snail shells, and they used them as territory landmarks. They also dug up the sand to make breeding nests; most of the African cichlids available in the pet trade like digging around in sand and/or gravel.

This page looks like it's got a lot of good basic information:
http://animal-world.com/encyclo/fresh/c ... chlids.htm

Just going on their water requirements, the best cichlids for an aquaponic system would be West African dwarf cichlids or South American cichlids, because it's hard to keep aquaponic water as alkaline as the African lake cichlids like... not to mention finding plants that will be happy in it! That still covers a ton of very pretty species to choose from.

I have a feeling the cichlids my LFS guy recommended me to get are from Lake Malawi because he sold me the (bloody expensive) Lake Malawi carbonate salts and buffer.

So my tank water is stable at about pH 8 and a kH value of 4.

How do I determine what plants will tolerate these levels?

Also I've been looking at these:



They might be the least risky solution to keeping plants. Surely I could tie little mesh bags over the roots to protect them from nibbling cichlids?

It seems some cichlid owners have Pothos (Devils Ivy) growing well in their tanks with a bit of root protection...

Some have them in baskets that hang over the side of the tank... I wonder if I could achieve the same by using a breeding trap/net like one uses for Guppy fry?

Or even just a soda bottle or Tupperware with holes drilled in it then suction cups to attach it to the tank wall....

Ok so after lots of Internet research I decided that having the plants with their roots directly in the tank was the way to go.

At Bunnings I found a slimline, clear acrylic rain guage that I thought would function really well as an unobtrusive hanging plant root-protection basket. Once I drill it full of holes of course for water flow!

So I bought some Lucky Bamboo from B as well to pop into the basket as my first test plant.

Results after drilling holes in the rain gauge and putting everything in place:





It's really not that obtrusive or ugly - though in a perfect world I would love for it to be much longer so the roots don't look like they are floating in space.

So now it's been a week since I put the Lucky bamboo in the tank and my nitrates are most definitely dropping.

My Nitrites just hit 2.5 ppm - so the tank has only just fully cycled and normally Nitrates would be 160ppm plus but the bamboo is maintaining it around 40ppm for the last two days.

This is my cycling graph:



Red is Nitrites, Green is Nitrates and blue is Ammonia.

I added the bamboo on the 29th and you can see what a positive affect its had on my nitrate levels.

Noticed today that the bamboo is starting to send out new roots like crazy - so it must be happy!





If anyone is curious how I removed the numbers from the acrylic - Acetone free nail polish remover. Just make sure you rinse it off thoroughly before it goes in your tank. Don't use acetone because it etches the acrylic.

So someone just gave me Pothos clippings which I've read do well removing nitrates from aquariums. I'm going to trial these next - just have to figure out how to accommodate the root basket for them with my sliding glass lids...

Haha!

Just found a company called Riparium Supply that sells clear acrylic planters for emmersing plants like I have done.

Apparently the style is called "Riparium"

Probably derived their name from Riparian - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_zone.

I like the planter you came up with - looks neat

Thanks! I found a clear acrylic jug in woolworths which was only $8

So I've drilled it full of holes for my Pothos experiment. I'm hoping if I stick it in a corner once it's full of plants it will just look like a clear cylinder and not so "jug like".

Will post photos once it's done.

And thanks for explaining the Riparium thing... I was wondering where the "Rip" came from.

The hanging acrylic plant holder is a nice addition. Even better that you DIY. I just recently started to drop in soy seeds into my tanks. They fall to the bottom and start to grow in 3 days. The fish nibble on the roots. Also any seedling that gets thinned goes in for food also. I try to re-cycle everything.

Tank cycled just in time for Mothers Day so my little family treated me to 12 cichlids babies!

4 Cynotilapia afra - 1 male and 3 females

4 Metriclima Lombardoi - 1 male and 3 females

4 Pundamilia Nyerei - 1 male and 3 females

Everything seems good so far. PH, kH and gH are stable. Nitrate levels have dipped down to 5ppm

Ammonia is holding steady at 0.25ppm but I think this might be false positive as even freshly treated water shows with 0.25ppm ammonia.

With fish that small in a big tank for them it might take a few months to have the ammonia level climb up. I once ran a "small fish" in a big tank for almost a year before it needed a water change. When the water gets a yellow tinge to it, the ammonia is high enough to see. Hold a clear glass of it up against fresh water to see if it is yellow. That is my high tech. These fish are very territorial have any of them taken over a part of the tank yet. Staked a claim and fight off the others. If not, they should. My one baby blue tilapia has claimed about 1/4 of the tank it is in.