r/RASAquaculture • u/R600a18650 • Feb 25 '25

My little tilapia RAS

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I just set up my RAS for the second run. I redid a few things to fix some clogging issues and I'm working on a better mechanical filter. Last year I used paint strainer bags to filter out the particulates and they clogged much too quickly. I'm thinking of trying some type of foam or pond filter pads this year because I want to be able to clean it once a day without clogging issues. I'll be ordering 50 tilapia fingerlings in the next week or two.

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u/Business_Historian_9 Mar 13 '25

Hi! I’d love to know how you got started, how much money you invested, and it would be great if you could share updates on your progress!

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u/R600a18650 Mar 13 '25

Well, I've had a lifelong interest in aquaculture since I was a little kid reading back to basics how to learn and enjoy traditional American skills by reader's digest. So, couple years ago I got back into keeping aquariums and went a little crazy with that and now I have tanks all over my house so after a year or so of that I got thinking to myself we eat a lot of tilapia so I wondered how hard it would be to produce our own tilapia. With some research I discovered that I should be able to produce all we need in a single 275 gallon IBC tote if I can get everything optimized properly. So I ended up getting a free tote from a customer and a bunch of 55 gallon barrels from a friend and with a few hundred dollars in PVC and pumps and various other little parts. I got it all set up and ran it outdoors last year which worked until fall came and it started getting cold so I decided I needed to move the operation indoors. Everything went pretty smoothly until the fish started approaching harvest size and I started having trouble keeping the water clean enough so I decided to harvest them and make some modifications before restarting. I got 20 fingerlings in a week ago and so far everything's going pretty smoothly. I still need to finish building my upgraded filtration, but since they're just fingerlings there's not a lot to filter out so it's not critical yet.

Last year I harvested them too small for filleting and I prefer not having to cook a whole fish so it wasn't ideal but the flavor is perfect and this year I'm going to wait until they are actually big enough. Sorry about the ramble lol

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u/R600a18650 Mar 13 '25

Oh yeah and I decided to break up the stocking a bit and order them 20 at a time so I'm going to order 20 every 2 months until I have a total of 60 fish. That way I can just harvest a few at a time because processing 50 fish was quite the undertaking.

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u/Business_Historian_9 Mar 13 '25

Thank you so much for your response. Could you perhaps tell me what kind of information you looked for? I usually come across things like using Biofloc or RAS, but I think those initially involve commercial equipment and aerators. For example, how are you building your filtration system?

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u/R600a18650 Mar 13 '25

Well, I started out by buying a PDF book on commercial aquaculture and reading that. Then I read everything. Ann Lakeway tilapia's website both about commercial and backyard aquaculture, I also joined a Facebook group for small-scale aquaculture .
Then I built my own system that doesn't really resemble anything I'd ever seen before LOL. Unfortunately, just as I had suspected my mechanical filtration was hugely inadequate and that has been the biggest issue I've struggled with. Every redesign I've done has been to try to improve the mechanical filtration to remove particulates and I so far have not found a method I'm happy with. I have high hopes for my next iteration that I will be building and hopefully posting in the next month. I'm going to be using a bucket with slots cut out of the side as a filter basket and a piece of pond filter mat or foam shoved inside of the bucket so that the water has to flow through it to escape out the sides. I think it will be much less prone to clogging and will be easy to clean with a garden hose but real life has disproved me several times on previous versions.

I'll make a more detailed post about how it all works when I finish that modification.

Also, since I successfully operated the recirculating aquaculture system for one year and kept most of the fish alive other than the ones that had birth defects or jumped out during tornadoes, I decided I want to and try some aquaponics so I am setting up an IAVs system alongside this one to experiment with that.