Comment

Moderator Comment by TCLynx on April 14, 2013 at 1:09pm

I would suggest you get up and running your first season with just the catfish and track your temperatures to help you figure out how many BTU's you will need to deal with for chilling the trout water.  You really need to have a lot of water flow through a trout tank to keep them happy and it may be hard to chill the water enough at that kind of flow rate for trout depending on what your high water temps are likely to be naturally.  Seeing as you are in CA, your climate may be dry enough for evaporative cooling to be of some help to you as well but that means you need lots of good source water to handle topping up that kind of evaporation of you design to get much cooling out of it.

Comment by Brad Moreau on April 14, 2013 at 10:29am

TCLynx

I was going to mix both waters into same swirl/bio filter to warm them up for the plants,than return to the same sump ( in ground concrete epoxy coated fish safe ) than trout water to freezer / refer to ft . cats straight from sump. it only get around 75* to 80* in the mid summer here. my towers are only 4' pipe with no meda, barrels will be only meda 10 1/2 barrels total. in construction stages " all feed back welcome "

Thankshttp://www.bkserv.net/images/Grin.gif

Moderator Comment by TCLynx on April 14, 2013 at 6:06am

Brad

Keep in mind if your water is flowing through flood and drain media beds and towers, the air temperature is going to have a huge impact on your tank water temperature as you circulate the water around.  And chilling water for the trout is going to also chill the water for the whole system and catfish don't eat as well in cold water so make sure you pick a temperature that will still be suitable for your catfish to eat and grow too.

Comment by Brad Moreau on April 13, 2013 at 9:43pm

Hello

I'm Brad out of  Oceanside, Ca. starting up my system, going to be using  two ibc 275 FT w/ a 300 gal sump, four raft beds - 4' x 8'  eight 1/2 barrels w/ gravel, flood & drain  ten vertical towers. FT's one trout, one catfish. trout tank will have 2" rigid foam insulation board on sides & top. cooled by 316 stainless  1/2" soft tubing 100' long ran through a small refridgerator. ( thats my plan anyway) still workin the bugs out .this is my first try @ aquaponics, so its a learning experence 4 me, any feed back would help !!! my ft's are cycling for the first time, so I have a couple weeks or more to finish build. will post pic latter when more is done

Moderator Comment by TCLynx on January 24, 2013 at 7:59pm

Swimming up and down a corner or hanging on one particular area of tank wall or hiding in a pipe are all pretty normal behavior I've seen in some catfish while in other situations they will swim round.  In cool water like 50 F they are minimally active.

Comment by William Kohut on January 23, 2013 at 2:03pm

Looking to Purchase Channel Cats in NJ  

Comment by Bob Campbell on November 19, 2012 at 10:54pm

Thanks TC.  I'm sure the water and DO are good.  It must be they are scared.  They act like autistic fish, swimming up and down in one corner.  I have one that lives in a pipe; I rarely see it leave.  Oh well they are nothing like Tilapia but they are growing bigger so I guess they are eating. 

Moderator Comment by TCLynx on November 19, 2012 at 8:55pm

Make sure there is plenty of dissolved oxygen and the water quality is good.

In the outdoor tank at 50 F they are likely not eating much at this point so make sure you don't over feed and that uneaten feed is not building up in the tank.

The indoor aquarium fish I would expect to be eating but they may be waiting till they have privacy.  Catfish can sometimes be scardy cats.

Comment by Bob Campbell on November 19, 2012 at 7:49pm

I have 6 - 2.5" catfish in an aquarium at 80F, and 22 more in an IBC outdoors at 50F.   I have never seen either eat when I feed them.  They are getting larger, but they constantly hang out in a corner of the aquarium and the others crowd into the drain hole of the IBC. 

I've had these fish for at least 5 weeks so I assume they eat something, and I continue to feed them even though they seem to have no interest.

Is this common?  I can't even spark their interest with a high quality fry food I bought from the pet store. 

Moderator Comment by TCLynx on November 19, 2012 at 6:21pm

When I get new fingerlings I often get 5 or 10 lb of higher protein smaller pellet or grain size feed from AES to feed them until they are big enough for the Aquamax 4000.  You can grind the aquamax up a bit so it is smaller and sinks a little more for little guys but a higher protein feed for the first couple months often helps get them bigger faster and off to a good start.  Just make sure you have enough filtration to handle the heavier load from the higher protein feed.

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