"Help My Fish are Dieing" Tips to get help quicker.

[TCLynx]

So you managed to set up a system and get the water pumping around.  Then you add some fish and something isn't going right and fish are not surviving.

 

Here are the key points of information you should supply when trying to get help.

1-All water test results please include;

Water temperature

pH

Ammonia

Nitrite

Nitrate

 

2-Fish tank size

 

3-aeration details (many fish problems can be caused by lack of dissolved oxygen)

 

4-Grow bed size/type and media or filtration details.  Also, was the system bio-filtration cycled up previously or is this a brand new set up?

 

5-pumping schedule and amount of water being moved per hour and if you are shutting down at night (lack of dissolved oxygen overnight can result in dead fish in the morning.)

 

6-Amount/size/type of fish and any changes in stocking

 

7-Have you used salt already?

 

8-Source water and how you have dealt with chlorine or chloramine if using city water.

 

9-any other info about the system.  Changes you might have made?  Are you having algae issues, does the fish tank look like pea soup?  Fish feed problems?  Possible contaminated runoff getting into the system (like rain off a roof?) or some one accidentally spilling cleaning water into the system?  Or does the system experience extreme temperature changes through the day?

 

Armed with this information the people who try to assist you in dealing with the situation will be far better able to answer your call for help without having to ask you all these questions first.

 

There are few treatments available to aquaponics since anything added to the system will get taken up by the food plants.  Salt is about the only treatment you can add directly to an aquaponics system  without risking killing the bio-filter or making your plants inedible.  If you must use any medication other than salt you will need to set up a separate treatment tank that does not share water or filtration with the main system.

[Lonny Harper]

tc, how do I test for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrates?  I can't find a source for that test locally.

[TCLynx]

Shop

Here is one source for the kits and I'm sure you can find other sources with an internet search.

[DJ Bisson Jr]

Can you add too much oxygen to the water?  Is this found out by a Dissolved oxygen kit, but it sounds like it only measures the oxygen that is used up?

[TCLynx]

If you are simply bubbling air into the water or splashing the water, NO you can't get too much oxygen into the water.

 

You are only in danger of causing super saturation if you are using pure oxygen to bubble into the water or if you are injecting air under extreme pressures.  This can occasionally happen if you have a powerful pump that is sucking in air bubbles just before the pump due to a faulty seal but that is about the only way I have heard to cause super saturation unintentionally.

 

Supersaturation (that is getting more oxygen into the water than it can normally hold at a given temperature) can be dangerous to fish, (kind of akin to people getting the bends I guess.)  So don't go messing with trying to force more air into the water under higher pressures or using pure oxygen without some added research to know what you are doing.

 

A disolved oxygen tester or test kit will tell you the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water.  There is another test called a BOD which stands for Biological Oxygen Demand and that would tell you how fast the dissolved oxygen is likely to get used up.