Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey guys two weeks ago i installed my IBC AP in my backyard and got it running!

Last weekend i got my fish i went for Forrel, according to my suppler i could take 50 of them in the end i went for 40 + another 40 for system i would build for a friend.
The water values looked good;

CL 0
PH 7.8
KH 6
GH 8d
N02 0.5
N03 25

On transport we lost 6 fish and on adjusting to the water another 5 fish (we left the fish transport bucket in the water to adjust to the temperature for about 10 min then let them in)

The fish came on Saturday al was well, the even ate their first meal but i did lose one fish saturday evening.
Sunday morning i lost 1 fish but they were eating their food and swimming happy. But i wasent completely sure how much they needed so i gave them a little extra...

Monday morning the fish where all huddled together in the corners of my IBC but i was in a hurry for work so i threw in some food and was off...

Monday evening was when the killing began 7 dead and still huddling in the corners and not eating.
I refreshed 1/2 of the water in my IBC.

Water test:
N02 3? is hard to see on my current strips the scale gos from 1 to 5 with white-pink to very light pink...
N03 25
NK3/4 0.25mg/l

Tuesday morning 21 dead, I refreshed 1/2 of the water in my IBC.
Tuesday evening 32 dead, the water was dirty i could see i oily film on top of the water with stuff floating around. I refreshed 1/2 of the water in my IBC + scoped away most of the muck.

This morning 4 dead I refreshed 1/2 of the water in my IBC.
Just now 10 dead I refreshed 1/2 of the water in my IBC.

Status; 6 remaining fish still not eating.

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Lots of figures, but not much description.. system description and setup..
I am of the opinion that when you start doing major water changes, you are doing fish changes.
Most often the instability in conditions,creates even more stress..

You are also quoting readings like. NO2, and most won't know what you are talkingabout..

I have seen comments that test strips are notoriously inaccurate.. others may know better.. I use an API test kit..
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Dory for your dramas, but sounds like you are starting again.. ....
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Let me get this straight...

NO2 (nitrite) = 3
NO3 (nitrate) = 25
NH3/NH4 (ammonia) = 0.25

Not to be too harsh, but have you read anything about how to cycle a fish tank? I know on this forum it's generally shunned because people don't care about the fish they are adding, but you sir have a classic example of an uncycled tank getting a major increase in bio load causing an ammonia outbreak that killed your fish and caused even more ammonia... you should not be able to measure ammonia or nitrites, if you are measuring either of those your system is not cycled well enough to handle fish being in it and all you are doing is burning their gills until they are stressed out enough and they die. Imagine taking a gallon of ammonia in to a broom closet, closing yourself in the closet then opening the gallon of ammonia... how long do you think it takes before your eyes are burning from the ammonia fumes? Give it a try and you'll know exactly what your fish are going through.

If you want to try and save what is left of your fish you should pick up some ammonia detoxifier and dose daily per the directions and do water changes until your tank is finished cycling but there is a good chance your fish will still die because they have already been stressed so much.

Hi Njord,

Sorry to hear about your fish. Based on what I read you need to regroup and really get things figured out. I'd suggest using the fish you have left to get the system cycled (where the bacteria in the grow beds can rapidly convert ammonia to nitrate). I see that you're using an IBC for your fish tank, what do you have in the way of grow beds? If you haven't seen it there is a good free read called the IBC of Aquaponics - http://ibcofaquaponics.com/ - there is also a link in the upper right hand corner above.

It does look like your filtration wasn't ready for the fish load that was put on it and probably not cycled at all after only one week without fish. I'd say the odds are the last 6 will die as well probably because of damage to their gills from the nitrites and ammonia. Most people either fishless cycle or cycle using just a few fish to get the bacteria growing. Sometimes this takes only a couple of weeks and sometimes this can take over a month. Cycling completely would have probably prevented this (your still overstocked but I realize that was temporary) but there are probably a couple of things you could have done that might have helped.

1. Don't feed immediately and only start to feed if no ammonia or nitrite appear after the first day (fish excrete waste even if they haven't eaten, they just do more waste if they have). If you're system is well cycled you don't have to do this but this gives the system filtration some time to adjust. When you do start to feed, start with small amounts and increase gradually. I'll add a caveat in here that little fish can't go for as long of a period without food like larger ones so you have to adjust accordingly (larger ones can go for weeks in most cases).

2. Add 1ppt NaCl (Sodium Chloride)(use the kind without iodine and without anti-caking agents). The sodium chloride competes with the nitrite ion at the gills and helps prevent gill damage. Salting also helps the fish build a slime coat and helps them with stress. This won't do anything for the ammonia though .

3. Get any extra fish to a different system ASAP if your filtration can't handle it.

FYI - At 0.25 for ammonia you are probably not in the toxic range but I think the ammonia spiked earlier and at that time the reading was higher (Where it may have been at toxic levels). The effects of ammonia are pH and Temperature dependent (http://ibcofaquaponics.com/information/ ... nd-charts/). At 7.8 your pH is pretty high (we don't usually suggest messing with it since it will come down on it's own as the system matures). Watching the pH and temp of your topup water is a good idea because you may make conditions worse if ammonia levels are high.

A better test kit would be a good idea from the sound of it. Most people use the API Freshwater Master test kit. It's not perfect but does a pretty good job in most cases but uses the test tubes so it takes a bit more effort than the strips.

When you do these large water changes are you removing the chlorine or chloramine from the water? If you're not the bacterial filtration that you're trying to develop in your grow beds is taking a hit. From your readings you are getting some conversion to nitrate you're just not completely cycled.



I certainly don't feel like this is true.

Thankyou guys for your support, and feedback!



No, i had followed my suppliers advice, I only a week to cycle my tank according to my supplier it would have been enough, by now iv read about clycling and found out that i need far more time!


I do care, apart from flushing 100€ of fish down the drain it was a painfull experince to watch all my fish die...
I was missinformed and it was a painfull lession to learn.


Anyway on the good news iv got a few gold fish swimming happy in my system and my plants are growning explosively fast!! probebly because my nitrate is wel above the 100 p/m but at least my nitrite is 0 so it looks like i have it right now

In the meantime i have added a little citrise juice to reduce my PH ~7.5 but if i read the table correctly its better to have a higher PH if you have ammonica poisoning?


I have followed the exelent manaul on the IBC AP, due to the climate in Holland iv put the bottem tank in the ground so my fish can survive the winter cold and summer heat.
Right now i have one fish tank and one plant bed. Ill add fotos later this week;)


For now i will run my system on nonetible fish and after a while ill replace them with forrel again. (dont worrie ill find a good home for them;))


Gr,

Njord

Cant get the img thing working so here is a link to my google drive AP fotos folder:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id= ... sp=sharing

Here i have a small foto collection with fotos from when things went wrong with my forrel and how my AP looked just built, halfway this month and now.


Btw dont have a foto of my goldfish, unlike my forrel they are very shy and like to hide in the back on the bottem of my IBC.

I think rininger if one actually reads the posts and threads around here that cycling is very very strongly supported and most often a significant part of the advice from senior members to newbies is to make sure they take an adequate period of time to get their system established [with WQ testing] before adding just a few fish initially and gradually increase numbers and not to high/over stock an immature system....

you can cycle with fish - you just cannot/should not do it with a lot of fish, and in fact no system should **ever** get those numbers of fish in one hit, and much too high numbers to carry for an IBC anyway.

Those doing setup with fish would recommend very low stocking where the volume of water far exceeds the volume and levels of waste generation and generally smaller juvenile fish are used so they grow with the system.

I may have exaggerated a little bit, but there were a few threads that I commented on when I first joined this forum and I was kicked in the teeth for telling people to fishless cycle a tank, so I have a little bit of a bias on the subject due to that... which might lead to the exaggeration that "no one" on here cares about their fish... I don't believe that truly "no one" cares, just a lot more people than I'd like to see...

If it weren't for a few people that were giving me ideas and answering questions I probably would have left the forum shortly after I joined due to having such vast different opinion on how to start a tank / cycling and the negative feedback from trying to teach someone new to fish how to fishless cycle.

I was rereading this thread and noticed this statement.

1. You're reading the table incorrectly - Ammonia is actually more toxic at the higher pH and higher temp so smaller amounts are toxic.

2. Citrus juice has anti-microbial properties and could cause problems for you biofiltration (The amounts used may not be a problem (I'm not sure) but just so you're aware). Hydrochloric acid (aka muriatic acid) is a strong acid that works well for adjusting the pH but nitrification will eventually drive the pH down without your doing anything.

Be careful what you believe from anyone trying to sell you something =) It's pretty rare to have someone selling you fish who actually takes the time to teach you how to do things properly because either they just don't really know themselves, or they don't care and can make another sale when you come back to replace fish that died. It's pretty sad really, because the number of sales they gain by giving bad advice is probably about the same number of future sales they lose by someone leaving the fish hobby due to their failures with spending a bunch of money on something that just died... we've all been there at some point, but as you get farther in your experience you'll start to see those examples that I'm talking about where people have aquariums and try a few times and never have any luck so they sell the aquarium... personally I'm going the other route - I'm setting up tanks for kids for free just so I can cycle them myself then get the kids addicted to aquariums and teach them things along the way because it really is a fun exciting hobby with a lot to learn if people don't get beat down by bad advice to the point that they give up.

You're on the right track though asking for help places like here that aren't trying to sell you anything... so hopefully your next attempt will work out OK!

rini i think scotty is on the money if your using strait tap water for your initial fish tank fill and every water change after it, it's the chlorine or chloramine killing your fish

one time i was doing a water change in my aquarium i had 2 Barramundi happily living i done a 20-25%water change and had a brain fart moment where i forgot to add the special product that removes chlorine and chloramine and one of my Barra's died within 20mins after thewater change before i caught on

my aquarium cycled after 2 months and its only 60 litre tank one Barra one Bass but in saying that i added 16 small lovey dovey fish to my Aquaone AR380 tank its about 32 litres the filtration is really good in this tank tho and it cycled much quicker

i cant say the same for products your eating so dont go adding chlorine removers to your water it works on display aquariums but is probably toxic to humans so look for something that is designed for aquaponics

Im interested where your going with this one rininger. I think its very important for members to know that cycling with fish is fine if done correctly. Fishless is not a bad way to go if you don't feel confident or you don't have access to BYAP where you can get experienced advice on hand. But other than that, if a few simple rules of thumb are followed then cycling with fish is encouraged and really quite easy.

Cycling with fish doesn't mean you don't care about your fish welfare and I hope you don't feel that way, if so Id like to hear why. Maybe Ive read your post incorrectly and if so I apologise.

With correct water parameter management, stock density, aeration, salinity, testing, system design etc you can easily nurse a system through a cycle without coming close to casualties. Ive done it many times and so have many, many others.

Take it slow, and let it grow.

I'm not really going anywhere with it because I'm already tired of talking about it =) I was just clarifying that I might have been a little facetious with my original response just due to my personal beliefs on cycling.

To me the problem with trying to teach someone new to keeping fish in boxes to cycle a tank using fish is pretty easy, they are new, that means they have no experience. It doesn't really matter how much you tell them they need to test something to make sure it remains safe for the fish (which a lot of people don't bother explaining, obviously shown in OP's situation the LFS told him it was OK without explaining what they needed to do to keep it OK), they are only going to absorb part of what you tell them and then they are probably going to do the rest of it poorly because again, they have no experience... so the risk of having someone lose their investment because they didn't do something correctly is pretty high... I hate flushing money down the toilet so I maybe incorrectly assume everyone else hates it too. The risk of flushing money is significantly lower by teaching patience (a.k.a. fishless cycle for about 30 days) instead of trying to teach everything you need to know to be successful on day one of setting a system up. Yet it's still all too common practice to tell new people to cycle with fish even though they don't have your experience and aren't going to absorb all of the critical pieces that they need to know to be successful on day one. Even if you tell them they need to monitor the ammonia etc. to keep the fish safe there is a learning curve to titration test kits... you probably aren't going to do it 100% accurate the first time you ever pick the kit up... if we teach patience then they can learn how to do those type of things before adding an extra level of complexity with trying to keep something alive while learning everything else, but it's almost like those giving advice need the same instant gratification as those out making impulse buys, they don't want to wait 30 days for the tank to cycle, and since "Ive done it many times and so have many, many others." then we expect that someone with zero experience is also going to be successful... that's probably the exception and not the rule... as a rule people with no experience are probably going to fail because they don't know what they don't know... when people fail there is a high chance if they've invested a lot of money they might just quit because they don't want to invest even more money and fail again...

so that's where I was going even though I really didn't want to get in to it...

Hey guys good news, i have sent a pollite message to my suppier about the dead fish. He has now agreed to send me new fish next month for only the transport costs.

Right now my values are stable the N03 (nitraat) is still high but its slowly dropping it was 150 and its now 100.
Only thing im slightly worried about is my water is turning green with alge, is this a problem? And if it is wat should i do about it?

Hiya Njord most systems go through a pea soup stage, usually lasts for a couple of weeks then it clears up never to be seen again. There are things apart from time used to clear the water like barley straw but it's not necessary.
And for the record, like rininger, I think fish less cycling Is a wise way to begin followed by conservative stocking.
It's always easier getting back on the bike if you haven't fallen off.