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Comment by Kenyon James Hopkins on May 1, 2012 at 9:03am

Mike Holt, OK what I learned over the last couple of days is that tilapia can't filter the algae until they are more mature and develope their gill rakes. So, the algae serves no purpose in my system right now other than screwing with my PH and probably my dissolved O2. Fish still appear to be happy and healthy even though by all rights they should be dead with the levels of ammonia and nitrites I have in the system. I can't seem to exchange water fast enough to get anything to lower.

Comment by Kenyon James Hopkins on April 26, 2012 at 8:24pm

No, I bought a 600GPH pond pump that will work until my system is up to about 15 grow towers. I'll then have to upgrade to a bigger pump. But doing it that way helped me keep the startup costs down.

Comment by Kenyon James Hopkins on April 26, 2012 at 8:19pm

Building my own system from scratch by looking at what other people have built and the store bought ones and merging it all into something that works for me and my budget. I like the flood and drain grow beds many people use but pricing out the rocks for the cubic feet I needed for the system I was going to build was way too expensive. So I went with areoponics. All in all I like how it's turning out. System in nearly cycled, all the fish are alive, and the plants seem to be growing too. When it's completed it will have about 24 of the grow towers with 18 plants each and 200+ tilapia. I'm enjoying building it and can't wait to not spend a big chunk of my change at the grocery store.

Comment by mike holt on April 26, 2012 at 8:11pm

another question,,  are you running the pump that goes with the pool ?  just wonder if you could figure out how if not

Comment by mike holt on April 26, 2012 at 8:07pm

thanks alot for the info, I haven't started yet want to get all the info i can first. Also read the artical about pacu. Seems they will eat anything and grow fast. How do you like it so far

Comment by Kenyon James Hopkins on April 26, 2012 at 6:30pm

From what I know (and it isn't much since this is my first system) tilapia "eat" algae. They don't seem to mind it at all. I didn't intend to have a bloom, but the fish were delivered a week late and the algae got a head start on me.

 

Comment by mike holt on April 25, 2012 at 10:43pm

hey i thought the algae was bad , only questioning because im new and want to learn