Regarding "Frugal Fishkeeping"...

Now that is frugal! I'll have to get the broom and shovel out the next nice day we get.

Frugal, maybe, but wise? I dunno. Being from the roadway it is likely to contain all kinds of contaminants that might not wash away during the seiving process. Oil, grease, antifreeze... I know that the runoff that we sample from parking lots contains all kinds of nasties - poly aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), lawn chemicals (pesticides), soaps... I know that the PAHs are rather nasty to aquatic organisms and get bound up in sediments - I'd be afraid they were adhering to the gravel.

It would be terrible if the gravel undid all your hard collecting work. If it were me, I'd avoid it. That said, I have used runoff from my roof before. Not sure what that contains...

Around here they spread fly ash from the power plant with the salt.

I'm not really worried about contaminants on my road. I live on a country road right before a large hill and they salt it heavy. The road doesn't get much traffic either. I certainly wouldn't do this in a heavily traveled area. Troutperch beeman is similarly surrounded by low-use country roads. I've had this stuff in my 90 gal for ~8 months...and everyone is thriving. My engineering work is centered around SPDES (Storm Pollution Discharge Ellimination System) design and regulations...on-site treatment for water quality volume and stream channel protection design for land development projects. I would never even contemplate using crap from some gutter, but thanks for bringing that up, I wouldn't want someone to make that mistake and I wasn't clear.

Around here they spread fly ash from the power plant with the salt.

I find that very hard to believe. There are serious envirionmental testing regimes that LANDFILLS have to go through to be able to use that stuff to cap garbage in an engineered containment system. Not saying it isn't true, just my knee jerk reaction.

What is "fly ash"? I gather it isn't the end result of incinerated flies.

What is "fly ash"? I gather it isn't the end result of incinerated flies.

Either Flies or Green Sunfish!

Maybe it's a past practice or I am misnaming the substance. I know it's a is a by product of our local coal fired power plant. My father always referred to it as cinders.

Maybe it's a past practice or I am misnaming the substance. I know it's a is a by product of our local coal fired power plant. My father always referred to it as cinders.

fly ash is a by product of incineration, either of coal or garbage fired power plants. It has properties similar to cement and is often used as an additive when stabilizing impacted soils or capping landfills. One of the increasing use it in deep and shallow insitu stabilization of former manufactured gas plant contaminated soils, basically a 4-12 ft crane mounted auger drilling overlapping holes up to 100ft depth or more and injecting cement grout to render the coal tar impacted soils impermeable, thus locking in the contaminants. Worked on a small insitu design project in poukeepsie NY.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_ash

Although discussions of fly ash are fascinating, I'm going to move back on topic.

Here's my setup for a quick-and-easy homemade filter. I guess it's basically a hybrid between a sponge filter and an undergravel filter. It's just a thick cylindrical drinking glass with a nylon sink scrubby at the bottom covered in gravel. The air lift tube extends down the center and into a hole cut in the scrubby -- this holds the tube slightly above the bottom of the glass and keeps gravel from clogging it. The air tube coming in from the top has an air stone as a diffuser at the bottom.

I don't think gravel is necessarily essential here -- I've sometimes used just a few scrubbies stacked on top of each other. Anything else porus and that will support bacteria would also work. Gravel is nice because it's very easy to clean, and easy to transfer a little bit elsewhere to seed the bacteria in a new filter.

I like about this design over simple sponge filters because the glass keeps it firmly planted at the bottom, it's easy and clean to move out of the tank while cleaning if needed, and the glass forces the water to flow through more uniformly than with an open sponge.

This filter alone kept 30 heavily-feeding gambusia alive and happy in a 20 gallon tank for about 5 months -- including several stretches where I didn't change the water for a month or more.

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Edited by jase, 10 March 2008 - 10:43 PM.

I bought a 60lb bag of gravel at Home Depot a couple days ago for about $3.50. It's a little coarser than what I'd normally like, but is good natural-looking stuff and far, far cheaper than what I'd get from the fish store. I washed it in a large bucket -- took maybe 10 rinses or so to stop making the water really cloudy. Given that everything's still pretty frozen around here, collecting gravel from a lake or stream really isn't an option yet.

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Also, I posted in a different topic a couple pics of a very effective screen for sifting gravel that I made: http://forum.nanfa.o...?showtopic=4304

Cheers, Jase