As recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) grow in popularity, size, and complexity, their design and operating technology is becoming ever more advanced in order to ensure water quality and safeguard fish health and welfare.
Danish Company Blue Unit aims to be at the forefront of that technological wave, using data and visualization technologies to improve water quality and in turn, help produce better fish and reduce operating costs.
“Many fish farmers do not utilize or even understand the potential for optimizing their RAS farms. My 25 years’ experience in the business led me to realize how a simple centralized monitoring system could make a major difference to performance and output,” Blue Unit Founder David Owen told SeafoodSource.
The company was founded in 2009, first as a trouble-shooting consultancy on fish-farm water-quality issues, and later became a provider of all-in-one water quality surveillance systems. The systems give 24/7 insight into a farm’s water quality status, using subscription-based software that is regularly updated to ensure optimal protection.
“Our system uses special designed censors to measure pH, oxygen, opaqueness, conductivity, redox, rH (redox less pH), salt content, temperature, totally dissolved matter, available CO2, total CO2, H2S, and non-carbonate alkalinity. These are all vital measurements that need to be in balance to ensure a RAS system is performing as it should,” Owen SAID.
Every day, 2,700 measurements are uploaded to the cloud and remotely analyzed to provide early warning of where, when, and why changes in water quality have occurred. Fish farmers are alerted via a built-in alarm system that is triggered when measurements reach critical levels.
“We can tell a farmer, for example, that the turbidity in his system is too high, which in turn will be breaking down the feed, keeping feces and fine particles suspended, overloading the drum filter, overpowering the biofilter, and reducing the efficiency of the degasser,” Owen said. “The end-result is that poor quality will be going back into circulation, but without an efficient monitoring system, it is impossible to know where something is going wrong.”
The system has been benchmarked against more that 50 farms around the world, with new data added as more customers come on stream.
“A growing number of fish farms are adding our system to their RAS farms and it is great to see the big new farms putting them in for cod, trout, and salmon from the get-go,” Owen SAID.
Fishbase Group, which produces salmon, trout, and cod for other producers, have completely reworked the way the business is run after adding Blue Unit's technology to its production system in 2020.
“We only measured water quality a few times a day and only on three parameters before,” Finbase Group CEO and Partner Henry Thomassen said. “With Blue Unit, we have put water quality and water chemistry at center stage and receive updates 24/7 for optimized risk prediction. In fact, we have not had a single critical event since we began our collaboration.”
Photo courtesy of Blue Unit
