Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

boss they go absolutely crazy when they see me now... not from being afraid of me but from acting like they are starving. I think I went in there 3 times last night to see if they acted like they were starving every time I went in and they did every time. Mind you my feeder feeds them every 2 hours between 6am and 9pm. It was every 3 hours but I bumped it to every 2 hours not more than a week ago, and I'm considering bumping it to every hour now that I see how crazy they are going when I go in to feed them. My lights are on from 5am til 11pm, so I could just change the times and get a couple more feedings while lights are on.

I think I need to set up some DWC indoors with the tilapia. I'm running 3 HOB filters for aerating and to help keep the water clean (as long as I remember to clean the filters every few days... I had gone a couple weeks without cleaning them and the water was getting pretty bad but after rinsing them good it's working on polishing the water again). The plan is that I'll be able to pull the smaller filters off and move them to smaller tanks once I have babies and it will move bacteria in the filter to the new tank to auto-cycle for the babies. In the saltwater aquarium hobby we call mechanical filtration "nitrate factories" because they are great at converting waste (food/poop) to nitrates by trapping solids in the high flow area of the filter it helps break them down faster which causes higher nitrates. In saltwater aquariums we avoid mechanical filters due to that reason, but in this situation I need to come up with a way to use the nitrates for plants... so maybe I can build a shelf above the fish tanks that I could put a couple of DWC tanks on and pump water from the fish tank up to the DWC tanks and let it gravity drain back to the fish tank (because I've heard tilapia are really good at eating all of the roots off of plants if you have DWC directly in their tank).

Awesome dude, I'll be following this with much interest.

A little upgrade to my fish room over the weekend... in anticipation of getting my tilapia to breed I built a big shelf to be able to set up more fish tanks for housing tilapia fry in.





I started building a filter for the greenhouse as well but after I cut a hole for the drain I realized I forgot to get a piece of plumbing to connect the drain for the filter so I had to put that on hold... my wife picked the part up for me yesterday so hopefully will get back to working on the filter this week.

I also started building my first solar heater for the greenhouse. I bought three pieces of brown downspout that I will cut down to length and piece together. I built the box for it and started sealing it. I have the inside of it caulked and need to caulk the outside of it, then I need to paint it black on the inside and white on the outside. It's supposed to be nearly 50F today so would have been an awesome day to work on the greenhouse but thus I have to work...

I picked up a few more sheets of plywood to work on the walls inside the greenhouse, but then I ended up using two of them to build the shelves in my fish room... so I have 2 or 3 pieces of plywood left that I could work on the walls... that would probably be enough to do most of one of the two walls I have left to do, but I realized I still need to finish running my internet wire before I put up one of the walls (the more important one where most of the cold wind is coming from).

It did warm up enough in the greenhouse this past week that I had a bunch of lettuce sprout. I gave up on the tomato plants as they were all getting pretty soft, I ripped them out of the beds... it seems like some of the lettuce I had hidden behind them has started growing better since then... must be getting a little better light now. I hadn't really thought about it when I first planted the tomato plants that they were in the wrong part of the bed and would block out light to other plants.

Looks great. Do the aquariums weigh much?

They could... it will all depend on how many tanks I decide I need. I think it could be 27 ten gallon tanks on the three levels of this shelf. So if I did that it might be close to 2500lbs that the shelf would need to support (divided by three shelves... but it might actually be close to 24 twenty gallon tanks that would fit if I decided to go that route, which would be closer to 4000lbs), but I don't know how many I'll actually have running at any time right now... a lot of the shelf might just be storage space... previously I just have my desk and credenza in my fish room and one small shelf in a closet so I always had the credenza piled high as well as the desk. I am getting rid of the credenza and this should hopefully make it so my desk can actually be used.

I don't know how many tanks I'll actually need to run at any given time. I am thinking I will keep 2 males and 6 females (they recommend keeping 1 male per 5 females, but at least initially until I get the hang of things I am going with 2 to 6, then I can decide later in future generations if I want to go 2 to 10 or cut back to 1 to 5.) I'm not sure how often tilapia will spawn, and I don't know how many there will be per litter but I think I read there could be anywhere from 20 to 2000 eggs per batch or something like that.

Depending on the litter size I will need a minimum of 6 ten gallon tanks (one tank per female to keep litters separate for grading purposes). The litters will need to stay separate until they are at least 1" long at which point they can be graded (fast growers will be kept for breeding/eating/selling, slow growers will be fed to my chickens/dogs, medium growers will depend on how many fish I have going as to which of the two other categories they get put in...) once the fish are graded I will probably have a larger tank that the "fast growers" might get combined in to (depending on size if they are similar size to other fast growers in the tank at the same time), and all of the "slow growers" will get combined in to another larger tank and will only be grown out to a time/size as I see fit to feed them to the chickens or dogs. I have not decided on a third tank for the medium growers or not... again a lot will depend on how many fish I already have in the fast grower category as to if I put medium growers in with them or not. I may need additional larger tanks for different age groups of fast growers until a point that they can be moved to the greenhouse (I expect to have fry year round, but tilapia will only be in the greenhouse in the summer...) so there are a lot of unknowns right now which I can read about but won't really know until I get my hands wet myself...

not the best picture, they didn't want to be pulled out of the water and didn't want to hold still while I tried to take their picture... but it looks like my trout are still growing although not quite as fast as I would have hoped (not keeping the greenhouse warm enough to make them eat all the time... some days the water is too cold and they don't really eat when I feed them). Hopefully they will still be large enough to make it worth while before it gets too hot outside this summer or I'll have to move them indoors and figure out how to cool the 240 for them to reside in...

Looking nice! I'm going to begin raising trout this year as well.


Cheers - Jens

here is the reason I don't get much done on my projects these days =) 5 months old last week



I'm not complaining... he's worth not getting my projects done!

Hehe, I know how you feel about that. Our youngest is 3 y/o and daddy's little princess!
Needless to say she takes a lot of my time and focus! :-/

Cheers - Jens

Aw, handsome little guy. On the multiple tanks on the shelf, I'm sure you have done this type of shelving system for you aquariums, so take this with a grain of salt, I was wondering if you plan to add supports under the horizontal lumber so they don't need to rely on screws or brackets to hold the weight?

Yeah I'll add more reinforcement once I know how I'm going to use the shelf long term. I built the stand for my 240 gal although I opted to go with mostly 2x6 on it, and it's been solid. Had to support close to 3000 lbs when it was fully operational... And I even managed to do it without cracking the ceramic tiles it is sitting on was the most impressive part... I don't think I'll really have that much weight on the shelf but I'll add more vertical boards to support the weight of the shelf so the screws don't shear off.

You could put a battern under the front & back legs to spread out the load over four (x3) tiles.

Pete.

I managed to finish all but one small piece of plywood on the west wall and about half of the east wall today. I need two more sheets of plywood to have the inside finished as far as putting up plywood goes.

I have the first solar heater box built and sealed then painted the insides of it black today, need to paint the outsides white then I'll move on to the next stage of assembling it.

I also finished building the first rff filter for the aquaponic fish tank but the uniseal I put in the fish tank is leaking... Must be ibc is too thin to seal against. I will try to silicone it and see if it will seal it otherwise I will need to get a bigger bulkhead fitting instead, so I ran the filter a few minutes using a five gallon bucket for a sump, but had to shut it down and put the pump back in the fish tank until I get the uniseal to quit leaking.

Not sure what a battern is, but what I did with the 240 gal aquarium was put a chunk of 2x6 under the main legs to spread the load, then also put a 2x4 running along the floor to tie them all together... Not sure if that's what you meant by battern or not.

I don't think I'll have nearly the amount of weight on the shelf is why I went with 2x4s (I did use a 2x6 for the back of the two middle shelves to add some strength without limiting the space I had on the front to access tanks... And because I had ran out of 2x4s and had 2x6 spares laying around

some pictures of progress this weekend...

west wall plywood up except one small piece behind the fish tank (need to move the growbed and possibly the fish tank to be able to put the last piece up... it will wait a while...)


east wall still have a little more plywood to go up... I bought a couple more sheets yesterday, so I should have enough to finish it now I think.


My SLO pipe. Didn't really get a chance to see how well this will work because the uni-seal was leaking too much to run it through the filter for very long (and I need to get a bigger sump tank, was just using a 5 gal bucket for testing). I will change the top 90 to a T as well, forgot to buy a T for the 2" line...


The start of the first solar heater. I have the inside of the box painted black now still need to paint the outside white. Then I need to cut the downspouts (which is the part I least look forward to... hate cutting any type of metal!)