Clear Water Article..?

[JCO]

Email from a new member to JCO about an article for the Journal:-

I would like to see an article on keeping the water and tank clean.
I am new so there may have already been an article on this.

My system is two months old with 50, 2" blue tilapia.
I had a real scare this week because the water in the fish tank (250 Gal
ISB) got really murky.
I did all the things that I knew about, increasing the water flow to the grow bed and adding clean water. I was showing off my aerator (it is a model for a pond) I turned it all the way up and forgot to set it back to the lowest setting. DUH. All that power stirred the sentiment up on the bottom.
I still need a way to clean the bottom of my tank though.
Thanks

[keith_r]

kinda hard to answer general questions when the answer is one of those "it all depend"

one of the most efficient ways is use of a slo of solid life overflow in the fish tank so that the water is drained from the bottom.. detrivoures may help (i'm using snails and scuds for several reasons, solids breakdown is one..)
it could be that the system is getting too much feed..
or not enough flow..
or,,,, or... i dunno

[bcotton]

Increasing the water flow to the grow beds worked for my system. I use submerged pumps in my sump. I took out the sponge filter thing so the small dust, sand and solids can make it to the grow beds. If the sediment on the bottom is light enough to get stirred up, it will make it to the grow beds, eventually.... In new systems, the substrate may be contributing to the cloudiness. (This is no big deal, i never rinse my substrate.)

[Analogy incoming, you can safetly skip this block of text and still get the main idea of what i am saying
I also brew beer as a hobby. There is a step in brewing where you are ready to "sparge" the sugar rich water from your mash tun to the brew kettle but you need to filter out all of the grain particles and anything not completely dissolved from your water. We do this by cycling the wort back through the grain bed over and over... The grain bed eventually "sets" (read settles) and the grain bed itself becomes a very effective filter. Your grow bed does the same thing on a much larger scale, it just may take days to "set"]

Manually cleaning the tank seems like a frivolous chore to me.

There's also the whole egg-whites as a coagulant thing, but i am of the philosophy that if you have enough grow bed, that seems unnecessary to me, too

brian

[rfeiller]

sometimes the pump comes with a plastic screen to prevent large items i.e. fish get caught up by the suction of the pump, but if not you can usually find at a fish equipment store a screen that will work. then as bcotton says intake on bottom of vessel and let it correct itself. sounds like you need to leave the pump cranked up to get the sediment into the sump or grow bed so that it can be handled naturally in the grow media or physically removed from the sump. if it is a lot of uneaten spoiled food it is better to remove it. if it is poop read through the post here, including oliver's basic information, which covers most of the basis and allow the poop to become another source of nutrients for the aquatic animals.

next step is to get a few red wigglers, if you are useing the grow bed as the receiver of the poop and let the worms loose in the grow bed provided the grow bed is an aggregate or hydroton.