Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Do a water change

Ummm, time to start using the loo instead of the fishtank! At least you know you have bacteria colonising your gbs. As you have no fish in the system I would be tempted to let things play out and do some planting. Rupe has been round these parts lot longer than me tho.

Tamo - do as the others have said (ie don't add any more urine) and if you find that the nitrification halts, retest your pH in case it has dropped to a point where the nitrification is being impeded. If this happens, add a carbonate source. Can be scarey when you see the blue-green colour for the ammonia - that colour aint on the card.

dare me?

i've still gotta catch the little bugger that shat on my motherboard and fried my computer.................i have two hungry murray cod..............

sorry Tamo, off topic here....

many years ago when I was working at the zoo, one of the guys and I decided to test the crocs. These are animals that have been in captivity for years and we wanted to see if they still "had it"

Now, this was a Friday afternoon, the boss was away for the weekend, so we caught one of the feral chooks that roamed the place and took her for a walk.

We threw the chook over the fence into the water. The bird had barely hit water when the croc grabbed it He was SO fast!

you want me to feed a chook to the cod?

how big is the cod?

A full size Murray Cod will supposedly take waterfowl...

But if it's getting that big, better feed it with a looooonnnggggg spoon. Otherwise you'll have to change your Avatar a little (arrr captn hook at your AP service)

I diluted the water by about 33% because that was easier than taking water out .

Most importantly, the basil seeds I had sown about a week ago have sprouted and are above the gravel now! It's weird to be so excited about a few very small green stalks, but I am.

Also, I don't remember if I mentioned the three things I did in an attempt to kick start cycling....

1, I took the filter out of my cats' water fountain and had just buried it in the hydroton. A lot of it was algae, but it was buried so they should die off, and I was hoping to get some beneficial bacteria from it. Also, there is the carbon from the filter in there too. Sort of a very weak RSG filter I guess.

2, I took about 500mL of water from a koi pond that has floating plants in it. I also managed to get 1 pebble from said pond to add to my system.

3, I only added hummonia twice to the system over 2 or 3 weeks. Looks to be a very concentrated source on the scale of a 30 gallon FT .

I'll continue to test water quality and when the ammonia and nitrite come down, I'll look at getting some goldies.

Basil!

Yes Sybil...... for God's sake don't mention the [s]Germans[/s] war .....

lol

After dilution and pumping for 6 hours, readings are unchanged. I'm probably WAAAYYY over 8.0 on the hummonia .

Consider upping the pH if you want to kick things along a bit. Because you have no fish in there, this is not an issue regards the toxicity of the ammonia. Use calcium carbonate, which will buffer at about 7.4, which will still be a suitable pH for when you add your fish provided you have the ammonia under control.

I'm sure this has been covered in other threads, but I'm quite lazy . What's an easy source of calcium carbonate?