SLO size

[Todd Pickens]

Greetings everyone.

I am a new guy in Texas and I am building 2 CHIFT PIST systems. My systems consist of a 275 gal. IBC fish tank with 4. 55 gal. plastic barrels cut in half length wise. The barrels are run end to end for a total of 24' of grow beds and each bed has a 1" bell syphone. I am using 1/2" crushed granite for my beds. My sump tank is 2. 55 gal drums linked together with 2" pvc. My pump is in the sump and it is a 1200 gph pond pump. After lift my pump should equal 700 gph. I will be raising 20 channel cats for my fish.

My questions are:

Does my system sound correct?

What size should my SLO be in my FT?

Is 1' of fall from my FT SLO to my GB enough?

Is granite ok for a bed media?

This is a great forum

Thanks

[TCLynx]

Does my system sound correct?

System sounds fine (though cutting barrels the long way makes balancing siphons more difficult and if you cut them around the middle you might loose a tiny bit of grow space but you don't have to build cradles for them.)

What size should my SLO be in my FT?

What size is the plumbing from the pump going to be?  I kinda like to do 3" SLO drains from most of my fish tanks in the aprox 300 gallon range, use uniseals to make that affordable.

Is 1' of fall from my FT SLO to my GB enough?

More than enough, especially if the grow beds are going right next to the fish tank.  All you need is probably 6" to adjust the flows into the beds to get them balanced.  Of course if you are running siphons you  will also need to add a bypass on the pump so you can reduce the flow through the fish tank/grow beds to help balance everything and avoid overflowing your fish tank.

Is granite ok for a bed media?

I believe grainte is ok for grow bed media, I've never personally gotten to use it.

Only think I have a big caution or question about.  Is that 20 channel catfish per system or 20 channel catfish total, 10 per system?

10 catfish per system as you describe (with aprox 200 gallons of grow bed per system) sounds about right to me since in a warm climate, channel catfish can easily get to over 3 lb in a year.

If you are planning to put 20 channel catfish per system, I'm a bit worried and will recommend you definitely start eating them as they approach 1 lb to thin the population before you overload the system.  But beware, excessive handling of channel catfish can also really stress them out, cause injury, disease and even death so I try to limit harvest forays into a tank to nor more than one day a week.

[Todd Pickens]

Thank you TCLynx and Randall

I found the uniseal site and I will be ordering them. I already built a bypass on my pump, figured I would have to tinker with it to get the flow right. I was going for 20 fish per system, but I will reduce it down to 10 per system.

Wasnt sure about the granite, but it is a lot cheaper than the crushed quarts I was looking at. I can get a dump truck of the crushed granite for next to nothing.

 

[TCLynx]

After your first year with the catfish, you can adjust your stocking as you see fit but for a first season I would keep the stocking a bit light as you learn.  It will give you more leeway in case of something going wrong.  Now when you first get fingerlings they are usually quite small so if you get one system online first, you could put 20 fingerlings in the first system for a time until the second system is online and then you can move half over.  then in the future you will probably stock the systems at different times to stagger your grow out and have a more steady supply of fish to eat.  Or you might experiment with another type of fish.  Having two separate systems is a good thing.  If something goes wrong in one, hopefully the other will be ok.  When you get new fish, be sure to keep them all to one system for like 6 weeks as a "quarantine time" now it may be simple to just grow them out in that system but if you are going to spread them around, definitely wait till they all prove to be healthy and parasite free before doing it.