Comment

Comment by Larry in Casa Grande on August 31, 2012 at 5:22pm

I am enjoying feeding my fish the homemade fish food produced by my Cuisinart out of the Seafood Medley, I found at Fry’s Supermarket a few days ago.

But I would like to clear up a misconception that I had about cost per pound.

I mentioned that the TopFin Fish food I have been using from PetSmart was costing me about six dollars a pound, and that I was buying the real seafood meat for about 30% less. I also mentioned that I might just feed all my fish with the new food all the time. From this string of facts I had come to an incorrect assumption, and may have inadvertently passed it along.

Here is what I have discovered. Although the seafood meat at Fry’s  cost 30% less than the TopFin.
the TopFin is a dry product. And with nearly every bit of the moisture removed, there are many more servings per pound, than with the actual meat.

I now intend to ration it every other meal to the mature fish tank, and only use it full time in the fry tank, as I am trying to boost the little ones growth before winter.

Sorry if my flawed theory mislead anyone. Just thought you should know.

Comment by Larry in Casa Grande on August 31, 2012 at 5:08pm

Well I must share with you that Bob and Sheri are down by about 40 of their Tilapia this week. They still had some left as of yesterday though.

Comment by Nathanael on August 31, 2012 at 4:13pm

Slight change in topic.... What are all of your thoughts regarding the different species of Tilapia available: Mozambican, white and red Nile, Blue, Hawaiian Gold. I would like the option to breed so all male is out for me. 

What are your thoughts?

Comment by Vlad Jovanovic on August 31, 2012 at 4:01pm

John, that's why you store the urine until the urea hydrolyzes into ammonia (then called humonia). That way you know how much you are adding. So there is no guess work like there would be if you were to "just urinate into the fish tank", thats really not the way to go about it.

The upshot over using humonia instead of Ace hardware (or whatever) ammonia,  is that aged (2-3 weeks) human urine also contains phosphates, potassium, magnesium, and other trace elements as well.

Comment by John Malone on August 31, 2012 at 3:12pm

A lot of people go the pee-ponics route, and I'm not necessarily against that.  Except...  there are too many unknowns for my liking.

Here are two of my favourite webpages

Aquaponic Gardening Rules of Thumb

Fishless Cycling

Quoting from the Fishless Cycling page:

 Can you just urinate straight into the fish tank?  Sure, but the problem is that since that urine will take a while to convert into ammonia you will have no way of telling just how much potential ammonia you have in there.  The levels will read very low, and then all of a sudden one day they will explode.

Since you don't really know how much ammonia you have put in your tank, you can't really know the state of the beneficial bacteria.

I'd recommend picking up some of the Ace Hardware ammonia, dosing your tank and testing.  If you can dose to 2-4ppm and have the ammonia and nitrites drop to zero in 24 hours, then you're good to go.   (Don't do what I did: tested at 8 hours and freaked out that the ammonia levels weren't dropping.  I came back at 24 hours and all was good.)

Comment by John Malone on August 31, 2012 at 2:59pm

Ace hardware for me too: Janitorial Strength Formula.

19th Ave and Union Hills

When buying ammonia make sure it doesn't have additives, surfactants and the like. You want the pure stuff.   If you shake the bottle and the bubbles stay, you don't want it.  Pure ammonia doesn't hold bubbles for very long.

Comment by Scott Bloom on August 31, 2012 at 1:59pm

Got my ammonia at Ace hardware, 1 qt $2.49.

Comment by Robert Rowe on August 31, 2012 at 1:44pm

@Nathanael - I got mine at 6-Points Hardware

Comment by Nathanael on August 31, 2012 at 1:41pm

@JohnMalone that makes sense. I'm pretty sure I'm tracking with you. I cycled my system by giving it a huge overload of seaweed extract and a little urin on day one. Curious, I spend some time looking for pure ammonia and couldn't find any and so went with what I explained above. Do you or any others have a go to place to pick up ammonia? 

Like you said, may never need it again but just in case it would be nice to have a small amount lying around.

Comment by John Malone on August 31, 2012 at 12:43pm

@Nathanael re ammonia additions.

When I was cycling my system I did the math to work out approximately how much ammonia to add to get to the concentration required in the system.

It wasn't all that difficult, although it's easy to get different units mixed up when you have percentages, ppm, ppt, gallons, cups, and etc and etc.

My ammonia bottle stated 10% ammonia.  That was my starting point.   My target, at the time, was 5 ppm.    Lots of scribbling on paper and some calculator work and I figured out that I needed about 1/4 - 1/3 cup of 10% ammonia to bring my 500 gallon system up to 5ppm.    I added the ammonia and 'Voila!' the water tested to approx 5 ppm.  As with every theoretical exercise, it's always best to check the results when applying it to a practical situation.

Now, unless you have the same strength ammonia and the same size system, you can't just rush out and dump 1/4 cup of your ammonia in to your system.   

I'm a math kind of guy, so doing the numbers was the obvious route for me.

Others use the 'sneak up on it slowly' method.  i.e.  Add some ammonia to the system and test to see what level you achieved.  Add more according to what the test showed.   Keep adding and testing until you get to the concentration you want.  Keep track of how much you added so that you won't have to go through the process again next time.   (Hopefully you won't have a next time, but I did, and it was good to know.)   Keep in mind that you need to allow the ammonia to distribute evenly in your system to get an accurate measurement, but don't wait too long because the bacteria are happily munching away all the time.

I used the 'add and test' method to figure out how much acid to add to my top-up water when managing the pH.  Now that I know approximately how much to add, the top-up exercise is a lot easier.

One important thing to remember is that although this can be a precise science, it doesn't really have to be, particularly for a backyard system.  As long as you are close enough, you'll be fine.

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