My system in detail

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...

My first post via email

Hi again

Wanted to check if I could really post via email...
While I am here, I will give another installment on the story..

Aquaponics (AP) uses 3 main methods to house the plants.  These are Deep water culture (DWC, also referred to as Rafting), and Flood-&-drain growbeds.
I did say 3 methods.  The third one is called NFT, and I am not going to discuss that now..

My current system consists of a FishTank (FT), a Swirl filter, a SumpTank (ST), a Grow Bed (GB) and a Smallfry fishtank.
Today I will discuss the swirl filter.  Basically a conically shaped plastic container, where water is pumped into the container at its midsection.  The water enters at an angle, so as to create a circular flow inside (also called a swirl or vortex).  Solids tend to move towards the middle in a vortex, and they collect at the bottom.  Clean water exists the filter at the top.  In my filter, I also have a lot of japanese matting inside, (drifting on top) which provides a whole lot of surface area for my bacteria to live in.  (biofiltration)

I hope this post-via-email thing works...

Beginnings: Basics of Aquaponics and my first Fish Tank.

Welcome to my Aquaponics Blog!!!

Lets start with the basics:

What is Aquaponics? - It is the combination of Hydroponics and Aquaculture.

We basically have a bunch of fish that crap in the water.  The water is pumped in a circulating system through a system of grow beds where we have plants that thrive on the fish waste.  A nice little eco system.  The plants keep the water clean, and the fish supply food to the plants.

 The above is an over-simplification..

What happens in detail, is the fish crap contains a crapload (sorry, had to do that) of ammonia.  The ammonia is broken down by a colony of bacteria (not scary things, but the good kind) into Nitrites.  There is another bunch of bacterial critters who in turn break down the Nitrites into Nitrates.  And the plants happen to love Nitrates..

Where do the bacteria live?  All over the place.  They need lots of surface area to cling to, so the sides of the fish tank, the sides of the plumbing, and of course the grow bed provides the surface area that is required.

This is my fish tank, when I first put it up: 

I cover it up so that the algae does not have such a field day (they need sunlight)

In Aquaponic-speak, we refer to the FishTank as the FT.  And Aquaponics is often referred to as AP.  On top of the FT you will notice a plastic 25Litre container that I cut open and filled up with gravel.  I pumped water in there to run through the gravel.  The idea was to use the gravel as additional surface area for my colonies of bacteria.    In aquaculture, the place where the bulk of your bacteria are housed, is called the bio-filter..

I will be adding some more information soon.  My system consists of much more than the above fish tank, but I will take you through it step by step, as I went along..  Please comment if you feel like it, and send this blog to people who may be interested.  I will be much more likely to update the blog on a regular basis if I know there are people who want to know..

regards