Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Can talapia be raised above ground swimming pools?

So once this thing gets going all I have to do is take half my filters over to another pond and it should be a lot easier to get the next "pond" going. I'm still a long ways to achieving homeostasis but at least now I'm headed in the right direction.

I drained the pool down last night to 500 gallons and topped it to 1000. I'm adding another 1000 today. Let's see how long I can keep it before I need a water change. I should be able to go longer and longer.

As soon as I can afford I plan to haul three more drums on top my car back home. I want to build one more for goldfish and add the other two to the pool. I also plan to build some sort of aeriation ring to keep all the poop in the pool stirred up into the sump pump.

One thing that looks really cool is I have all my discharge from the filters and my bypass so that it causes the pool to flow in a circle. The 4x4 sheet of plywood I put in for shade has gone to the center of the pool and it now rotates in a circle. It would really be cool to have the pump in the middle and dig out the middle of the pool so it is deeper. Then make an aeration ring on the bottom of the pool around the sump to keep everything stirred up. I think I still will do that only I will put the whole thing off center towards the deeper end of the pool.

Instead of a check valve you could drill a small hole in the feed line of the first barrel just above the water line. If the pump turns off this small hole will allow air into the line stopping the siphon.

Is that commonly done? What size hole would be needed to break an inch and a half line? I was thinking that the check valve was going to be overkill unless I planned on being away. I have regulator valves going to each filter that I could shut off if there is a problem and I could always fill the barrels back up with a hose or bucket if it accidentally gets drained due to pump failure. If it is an electric outage I will know right away. I can run out and close the regulators in plenty of time. But why take the risk if all that is needed is a simple drill hole... as long as I don't have to bypass too much water for it.

My filters seem to be holding their own. Do you guys think three filters will be plenty? I would still like to add two more for good measure. The water looks pretty much the same color as yesterday. The Ammonia is 1 ppm. I also think I did the test wrong the first time I did it and got a false low reading. I wish I had done one yesterday. I think not feeding the fish is the best thing I can do till it goes down. I put some catfood in the blender and finely powdered it. Now I can give them a small pinch and it entertains them (and me) for a good 5 or 10 minutes. The same amount even crushed up is gone in five seconds.

A 1/4 inch hole will be plenty for a siphon break.
Your filters are not holding their own. They are barely started. In a couple weeks your filters will start to keep up with the ammonia, and nitrite will spike off the charts. Then in another three weeks or so the bacteria that work on nitrite will start to catch up with the nitrite. Meanwhile you should be doing large water changes daily to keep both levels sub lethal. Your fish will be fairly stressed during this time period. Take you salt levels up quite a bit to help counteract the nitrite poisoning.
I would not expect the filters themselves to handle the waste from much more than 100 pounds of fish but with the additional help of greenwater, you might be able to handle more. If you are raising 300 pounds of fish your system is going to need to process 6+ pounds of feed per day. That is not going to be an easy feat for your drum filters. So adding more would be a good idea, but you might want to alter the design, and make a couple into trickle filters so the nitrifying bacteria is exposed to more O2. This will be more efficient. Or better yet, use the outflow from your existing drum filters to spin some RBC's.
I kid you not, you are in for daily water changes for a month. If you had done a fishless cycle, you would have conserved quite a bit of water, not stressed your fish, and would have sped up the cycle. If I were you, I would put your existing Tilapia in the freezer, do a fishless cycle, and order new fish in a couple weeks. But what do I know?

True, definitly not an ideal situation as many have stated. Is there any one near by with an established hydroponics system that you could borrow or trade some filter media with? I would think if you could get a gallon of media from even an aquarium sump it might put you a little bit ahead of the game.

Also remember that fish can go long periods without eating. I wouldn't bother unless they got really aggressive and smaller fish started to dissappear.

Yuk! I just ran an ammonia test on my tap water and I can hardly tell the difference between the tap water and the water in my pool!

Will be interested to see how this works, as I wanted to try something like this as well.

Keep us posted on how this goes.

Thanks

I have read some guys have used a soaker hose as a diffuser. Maybe someone who has tried this will chime in on on how well they work. It might work out really well in a fairly shallow tank.

Calling AP!

The number of filters depends on the max pounds of fish and the surface area of the media in the clarifier. I sized my filter using the following information from the SRAC article I post earlier:

10 grams/100 pounds of fish/day
Ammonia removal rates may range from 0.02 to 0.10 grams/ft2 of biofilter surface area/day

Assume the worst case scenario of .02 grams and then use 1 lbs of fish per 2 gallon of water in the tank to be on the safe side.

(lbs of fish / 100) *10 = bioload in grams

then

Bioload/.02 = ft2 of surface area required

ie 2500/100*10=250 g ammonia
250/.02=12,500 ft2 of surface area

So you would need 12,500 ft2 of media. Media is usually rated by surface area per ft3. Sand is 7800ft2 per ft3, lava rock is 16 ft2 per ft3, I have no idea what Deer netting would be.

55 gallon drum can hold 7.35 cubic feet of media when full.

A soaker hose sounds like a good idea. I was planning on using a regular hose and poking some holes in it.

Actually the reason I put that long piece of pipe in the pool was because I was planning on poking some holes in it so that it would act as an aerator but I think I'm going to use all the excess water from the pump to run a few more barrel filters instead.

I really don't need any aeration right now because the water coming out of the barrels is doing a better job than any air pump could do. But it still would be nice to have bubbles coming up from the bottom because they would stir things up much better. Especially when I start filling the pool up all the way.

I did an ammonia test and the filters are definitely doing something. I am sure I would have had to change water by now if I didn't have them. I think I will add some aeration inside at least some of the barrels but not until I get more microbes growing on the nets. Right now I think the bubbles would work against me because the would be knocking all the debris off the deer nets inside the filters. I think I need to give the microbes a chance to attach themselves to the net before I go blowing them around with bubbles.

My biggest concern right now is temperature. All of the aeration is keeping the water much cooler than I expected. This is fine right now but I realize I haven't got a chance of keeping these guys alive over the winter unless I take them in or build a greenhouse over them. If I'm going to successfully raise Talapia I'm going to have to breed them indoors over the winter and have all of my fry ready to be put outside in late February.

I am looking into other species. It looks like the water is too alkaline for catfish. At least for breeding them. But crawdads or prawns look promising.

It's going to be a battle just to keep the water from killing these guys but I'm glad I did it the way I did. In all honesty if I hadn't rushed in and done it now I would have been doing all this next year and maybe I would have never gotten around to doing it.

Ready Fire Aim.

I have lived my life by that principal and it has done me well... so far.

The Algae is likely doing more than the barrels at this point. Maybe the barrels are getting solids and dead algae out of the water so more algae can grow, but this early in the tank setup the plants are doing the heavy lifting. In fact you might want to put some potted plants in the top of your filters.

Check out the RAS book cecil recommended. they have some dome structures that might help. What are your lowest lows?

I will check that book out if it ever gets here...

Actually I was thinking about building some of my filters and using sphagnum peat moss instead of a deer net as filtration media. It would add nitrogen to the water and also acidify my 9.0 PH. It would also be cheaper too. Those deer nets are 20 "buck"s a piece! I could save some "doe". Maybe it would be smart to make bags out of the deer net and put the peat moss inside them. I'm not sure at this point but it seems like a good idea. Who knows. Maybe I can even get the PH down enough to raise catfish.

I don't know if the peat moss will have enough open areas in it to allow for good water flow. Good thinking tho. Let us know if you try it and what your results are.

I am thinking what I need to do is put the peat moss in a screen tray above the pool and spray it. It's the only thing I could think of that I can afford to do right now on my budget. So far all they sell in town is the ground up stuff.

If you use the ground up peat you could try to make a fluidized bed with it. Basically you need a pump strong enough to keep the peat (smaller the better) suspended in the water column (in the 55gal barrel) and make the return high enough for gravity to keep the peat from flowing out of the barrel.

I have never tried it but it could be a cheap experiment for you.

I think peat could be added to bring down Ph, and would work in say a bucket with water trickling through it, and draining out the bottom, but trying to use it as an actual filter media is just a bad idea. Too unstable, will degrade, and break apart, and become a maintenance nightmare. Maybe fill a 55 with it and very slowly trickle water through. Plan on changing it often. Again it is just a bad idea. Use muriatic acid to lower the Ph instead

A 7ft x 100ft roll of deer netting has approximately 200 square feet of surface area, give or take, depending on brand.

Another option for this type of filter is pvc ribbon. It is approx. 250 sq ft/cu ft.

I'm not sure how you are figuring that. 7 x 100 means the deer net is a 700 sq ft net. Unless you are counting the surface area of the actual thread of the netting. Then I would figure it would be much less. All I know is that I am very surprised how well they are working already. It's almost like the net holds a charge and particles are attracted to it. I can only imagine how good these things are going to work once they actually get microbes growing on them.

I checked my ammonia again and it's not climbing. My goldfish pools are very high but the ammonia actually lowered it's self in the one I put the fertilizer in. The other pair had a dead bird in the bottom pool this morning and is cloudy. Even though there is no filter in the little pond it is 2 years old and is probably the reason my new pools are doing so well. I took all the water and anything that was on the bottom and used it to start my other two goldfish pools and all three to start my newest one.

I got all the stuff except the netting yesterday to make three more drum filters. Home Depot was out of the good cheap netting so I ordered them from the internet off Amazon with free two day shipping. It's going to be great having a filter on the goldfish!

Yep. 7' x 100' = 700'. Minus the air space between the strands is how you figure the filter area.

Think of it this way. You could have a rectangle that is 7'x 1,000' but it is only made of a thin strand of wire around the perimiter. Would you count all the empty space inside that rectangle as filter area?

That's why filter media is small strands woven together with air space between them, in 1/2" thick or so mats. More surface area per square inch for the microbes and bacteria to colonize.

Sand has a huge amount of surface area, but only if it's fluidized. If it's packed together tightly, just figure on the square foot area that the perimeter covers.

Everything I read about using acid to lower pH seemed like a bad idea. When I experiment in buckets my water looks like soda pop by the time I get a normal pH. I'm not going to mess with pH on my talapia but I am interested to see if I could lower the PH enough to raise catfish. Maybe I will set up a kiddie pool and do some experimenting.

I agree that the peat will have to be use in baskets or trays above or away from the pool and water sprinkled over it. Otherwise it will just rot.

I just thought of something. Kitty litter is made of clay and I think it has a low PH. I will try and remember to buy a bag of the cheap stuff to test it out next time I go to walmart. When I just researched it some people say it makes the water acid and some say it doesn't and depends on the brand. One guy bought a product from walmart automotive that he claimed made the water so acid it killed his fish but I suspect it may have contained some kind of additive.


As far as I know I am the only one for at least 100 miles raising fish. But I got a feeling some of my neighbors are going to start doing it. It has also lowered the temperature in the area significantly and is becoming my favorite hang out spot. Dragon flies regularly visit the pool and bats come by at sunset and sunrise. They fly all over the area and dive bomb the pool. Zeroscape is the norm out here but I am going for the oasis theme... even though it's not PC... OK maybe BECAUSE it's not PC!

The deer net is merely serving as an anchor. Already my nets are caked and have probably expanded the surface area by a dozen times. By the time they are fully grown with microbes there will be hundreds of times the original surface area of the deer net.

Hey Steve,

If I may ask. What is caking up your filters already? Is it fish poo, cat food, fish food... What?

Also, have you ever heard of Heterotropic, Isotropic, and Anaerobic bacteria?

You are going to have to deal with TDS (Total Dissolved Solids), which most forget about. This is greatly enhanced when you churn up the suspended solids, keep them in suspension, beat them up, and they break down to particles so small that they are easily dissolved in water. Hefty price tag to avoid this, without building it properly in the first place. Not to mention a bunch of other junk.

I may be out of the loop, but what specific microbes are you talking about to colonize your filters?

Anyway, This has been a fun thread to follow, and probably great fun for you, being a Fire, Aim, Ready kinda guy.

Best Wishes!

I don't know. Fish poop and algae? Maybe I should take a picture of it. I can see the net and just below the waterline there is about an eight of an inch of "stuff" on each of the fine netting threads. If I shake the net it all falls off. It doesn't seem to be random junk either because it's a hair like structure that is uniform. It could just be flow from the filter but it almost seems as if it's being held on by some kind of static electricity.

I have the water swirling counter clockwise in the pool and clockwise in all the barrels. Could it be building up some kind of a charge? I will see if I can get a picture of it so you can see what I mean. This stuff started collecting on the net by the next morning whatever it is.