Category Archives: Aquaponics

It’s been raining all weekend.  The good news is that my 275 gallon IBC is full of water for the new setup, but the bad news is that I have not been able to work on the new setup!   I need to get the water covered because algae is starting to grow, and that won’t be fixed until I get the tanks in place, GB media purchased, delivered, washed.   I may just have to ditch the water.      Or I might use that for washing the media…

Got the sludge out!   The fish tank IBC had been worrying me, as the pressure washer seemed to clean some parts, but they still felt slimy afterwards.   Fortunately, some Simple Green + warm water + sponge and a plastic paint scraper together with some elbow grease produced a clean fish tank!

The growbed/sump that had glue in it I gave a once-over with the Simple Green as well, followed by some Comet…  I figure if that is not enough, nothing reasonable will be.   Worst case, I can exclude that GB/sump from the system.  I’ll try putting some water in it and monitoring the pH change to see what happens.

Yuck!!

That’s all I can say about two of the IBCs.   Two growbed/sumps are just fine, cleaned up now.  The other growbed/sump used to have glue in it, it turns out.  See the picture below – I ended up using the pressure washer at its highest setting and it was able to get the big parts out.  After it dries out a bit, I may try sandpaper to see if it can get rid of the remaining glue bumps.   The fish tank is a little different – rather than glue, it seems to be some sort of greasy gunk that does not seem to go away  – there’s still a film on the inside.   I may try the bleach and hot water approach that I’ve heard suggested as a good general approach…  or I may look for a strong degreaser.

I finally found time to start cutting the IBC tanks today after extracting them from their cages yesterday.   I pulled all of the tanks onto the back lawn and tried cutting one of the cages with a metal blade on my “Sawsall”.   Wow, that’s some tough metal – it took three and a half blades to cut one cage in half!   I am going to look at using some cutting discs on my angle grinder tomorrow, as that’s the way most people seem to have cut theirs.   I still imagine it takes a few discs there as well.   Below is a picture of the cut result.

Back on the lawn, I measured three of the four for 16 inch deep growbeds – a little deeper than most I’ve seen, but done at the recommendation of Rick Op, who advises that the maintenance will be less with deeper beds – I’m all about low maintenance once it’s set up!   (Rick wanted me to make them even deeper.)  I cut them and also the top out of the fourth for the fish tank.   You can see a pic of one in the cut cage as an idea of what it looks like in the end.

As light began to fall, I fired up the pressure washer and started cleaning the grime off.   Fairly successful, although I was pretty disappointed to see that one of the growbed IBCs seemed to have glue in it – not budging at the moment.   I’ve read about one person’s trials with an IBC that had wood glue in his that he did not clean out – it sent the pH way up in the beginning for a while, which makes it hard to get the beneficial bacteria started.   I’ll see about what I can do to clean that one better tomorrow.   The others cleaned out really nicely and are ready for sanding and painting.

A few hours one day, and a couple of more the next… the old play fort from the side of the house is disassembled and out of the way! Not sure when I’ll get to start cutting the IBCs, as I’ll be out of town next weekend, but perhaps that gives me more time to plan.