"(((\" John Lange (((\""
wrote in message t...
This is our first season as a bait & tackle shop and this falls slack
time
is new to me.

As well as all the glass aquariums, I have 2 High Capacity Production
Systems (bait tanks) in our store

1) 120 gallons. during the season it houses anywhere between 40,000 &
300,000 1" to 6" fish.
2) 80 gallons. 100 to 3,000 6" to 18" fish

Both systems have chillers, UV lights, large circulation pumps, air
pumps,
and a bank of canister type bio filters that do very well at full
loads.

VERY soon we will be cutting back on capacity until the lakes ice over
and
ice fishing season begins. I was told that in order to keep the bio
filters
working, I need to either keep fish in the tanks or seed the tank with
liquid ammonia.

I would like to keep the tanks alive with very few fish. Any idea how
much
liquid ammonia I might need to do this? It doesn't have to be at full
load,
but I am thinking I will need a steady but slow trickle down to a few
drops
per minute to do this.

An idea's???

JOhn :-)

I'm still reeling from the 300,000 1" to 6" fish in the 120g. This is
not an aquarium... it's a block of fish.

From:

Subject: Counter-agent for Caustic soda? (lowering pH)
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 11:32:50 +0200
Organization: T-Online
Message-ID:
From: "Dr Engelbert Buxbaum"
Subject: Counter-agent for Caustic soda? (lowering pH)
Date: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 5:32 AM

snip
If you assume (worst case) that the food were entirely protein, then the
amount of nitrogen introduced into a tank is 10-15% of the dry weight of
the food. So 1g of food would result in max 0.15 g nitrogen, which would
form 182 mg ammonia or (finally) 664 mg of nitrate (calculations using
the molecular weights).
snip

That might be a starting point. Weight the food used and convert that to
ammonia. Note that household ammonia is not 100% pure. This will take
some experimenting (ie: find the quantity of ammonia which would be
consumed in 24 hours).

Another way is to keep using a large quantity of food. 100 fish fed once
daily will generate the same ammonia as 25 fish feed 4 times a day.
Using this, you could keep a few big eaters in the tank, with an
automatic feeder (multiple daily feedings). This would keep your
bio-filters humming at probably a reduced rate (compared to your 15,000
fish-inch load), but the nitrifying bacteria double daily, so you would
just need to ramp back up over several days when you start up again. hth

NetMax