I am working on planning my first system. I live in a 700 square foot apartment, so it's going to have be pretty compact and tidy (it's going in my living room). Still, it's important to me to grow food fish (tilapia). I have my eye on a galvanized steel 175 gallon stock tank (6x2x2), and I have a 4x2x1 fiberglass sink I'd like to convert to a grow bed. It sits on a steel stand, which I hope to modify to sit over the fish tank. For lighting, I was thinking 4 x t8, but am still exploring. The grow bed will sit directly in front of a large window that gets direct morning sun, so that will help quite a bit.
I want to do drain/fill, but don't know how to set it up yet. There's so much marketing and crap to wade through doing searches... can anyone direct me to some good reading to further my project design? Also, any feedback on my ideas so far would be more than welcome.
Thanks!
Ellen
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Keep Red Claw Crayfish ;)
BTW, my profile pic is a crayfish - I keep marmokrebs in my turtle tank *turtle snack!*
I keep 'em, but they still give me the creeps. I am definitely arachnophobic, and these little guys are just close enough to spiders! lol
Chi Ma said:
Keep Red Claw Crayfish ;)
BTW, my profile pic is a crayfish - I keep marmokrebs in my turtle tank *turtle snack!*
I keep 'em, but they still give me the creeps. I am definitely arachnophobic, and these little guys are just close enough to spiders! lol
Chi Ma said:
Keep Red Claw Crayfish ;)
Do you also have Red Claws?
The trick with tilapia is that if you have mixed gender in a tank that is warm enough for breeding, it's gonna get hard to control your stocking density.
And if you have equal grow bed volume to fish tank volume you can still flood and drain all at once, the fish tank will fluctuate but it is within the tolerance level of tilapia (tilapia are very tolerant fish.)
However,. if you get to the point where you wish to have more grow beds than a 1:1 you do have to deal with water level fluctuations, there are ways to deal with this too. In a system where there is not sump tank, you can simply use an indexing valve (but this takes a strong enough pump to operate it and a repeat cycle timer.) Or I suppose you could go multiple pumps on timers but you had better get a good aquarium wave timer or something that will ensure the timers don't get out of sync.
If using timers, generally you don't use siphons since there are benefits to fast fill on the grow beds and letting them slow drain since this will give some extra water/media contact time and some extra time for roots to get the nutrients they want while also allowing the solids to slowly settle out of the water into the grow bed. Fast drain on grow beds will pull more solids right on through though these will only be fine suspended material.
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