Its about time I introduce you to my system in some proper detail. I am constantly chopping and changing. The idea is to get you up to speed with the current state of the system, that way you can keep up with the latest updates and modifications.. Please see the Design page I have added to the right..
Now for the news.. I am the proud grandfather of a litter of smallfry! - Checked the Fishtank (FT) yesterday, and there they were!! I removed them and put them in the smallfry tank together with the fingerlings I had there. This morning they were gone.. Apparently Tilapia (that is the fish species I have in there) can be a bit cannibalistic when they are still small.
Dammit.
Good news, is this afternoon, I had a new bunch of smallfry in the FishTank, and I promptly added them to a clean fishtank indoors. They can stay there and grow untill they are big enough to go into the smallfry tank (whose fingerlings will then be moved to the main tank) Cool thing is now I can check out the babies all the time. You are not as lucky, being stuck with one lousy photograph:
This is SO COOL. The smallfry are really really small. I am talking 4-5mm in length. Some of them got sucked up into the overflow, and ended up inside the sumptank. Amazing thing is I saw some of them inside the filter! - those fish had to survive the gravity ride down the overflow into the sump, then getting rudely picked up by the big bad pump, and carried under pressure into the filter!!! - some of them probably also ended up in the growbed. They won't survive that. Oh well.
In other news, the drain of smallfry tank started getting clogged up by poop and all sorts of gross stuff. The clogging makes the water level rise until it starts to overflow. Not cool. This has happened before, and it causes the entire sump tank to get drained. Anyway, I started by cleaning the drain a bit, and then I noticed the entire smallfry tank had more poop than a sewage farm. Thought I'd go the whole 9Y and clean the tank. So I proceeded to remove the standpipe thingy I have in the drain of the tank, cleverly covering the hole using a halfbrick. I then proceeded to go around swishing like crazy in my poop-scooping efforts. In the process I somehow bumped the brick, opening the drain, and immediately the fish proceeded to race each other down the drain.. Now the fish are already bigger than an inch in length, and the drain is a one inch pipe for the first few feet.. Luckily I have a union on the drain, so I could disconnect the drain before it got to the sump. I had about 2 feet of pipe totally clogged up with suicidal idiotic fingerlings!!. And they were lodged up pretty tightly like sardines. Had to force them out by blasting the drain with a hose pipe, then running dementedly all over the place picking up a dozen or two fingerlings flopping about, gasping, wondering why the world was sitting on its side all of a sudden..
Managed to finish the day with only two dead fish... New Rule: NEVER have any open drains around the fishies. They are sorta dumb...
Hey Carel. Nice blog. If you make the T on the slo below the level of the FT top if the holes at the bottom get clogged or the incoming water is too much it just runs down from the T safely back to the growbeds instead of overflowing the FT. Someone had to suggest this simple idea to me too!
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