Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

i have built a biofilter out of a 5 gal bucket i had laying around, i have a hose that runs to the botton oh the bucket and then i placed a large airstone and then covered everytthing with volcanic rock, the water cycles up and then back to the tank, the beds are on a seperate pump but pump from the main res, will this system work? the res is about 55 to 60 gal

sound fine to me as a seperate biofilter

is there a reason for wanting a seperate biofilter as the growbeds are in essence biofilters (which have the added advantage of being semi self cleaning as the plants and bacteria take care of the solid waste)

They use those here alot for fish tanks saves a few hundred dollars and is easy to replace the "filter" when the time comes

well i had an existing hydroponic system where i used chem nutes the, it was basically a ntf system, it grew plants really well and well it all seemed to easy and i got bored with it, so i decided to try and step it up, so instead of taking out the plants i had and ruining my system which worked so well as a chem system i just swapped out the 10 gal res i was using for a 55 gal res and put some fish in it, then i build the biofilter to make up for not having the conventional grow beds

ahhh, then I would say yes, put in the boi filter (heck, you could plant into the top of it too )

my system is inside do anyone else have a system in their house with growlights ect? i want to build one for my living room with maby koi fish and grow strawberris or cherrys or if i could watermelon, i was thinking of using a 100 gal tank and a combination of mh lights and fluros

I had a system in my classroom which ran only on aquarium flurios... I got beans off of my plants AND other ornamentals flowered too
Look here for some image of the litle system:
http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum ... c&start=15

Hi rb , have been looking at seperate biofilters and alternate media and the biggest thing with a seperate filter is flexability to do anything ,Nft, deep water,aeroponics etc.Google "Jims crazy biofilter"great info on biofilter design with lots of easy to understand calculations for system sizing , just be careful remember its from the perspective of someone keeping fish not doing AP,but the science is the same.
Cheers

PS anyone explored fishnet as an alternate media ,as part of my turtle tagging work we clean up tonnes of ghost net off the beaches. am going to get a heap and plonk it in light proofed IBC(wash first of course) plumb some water to it and see what happens, great way to use up a real marine killer.

Hi AM,



If you don't have grow beds with gravel or some other suitable media, you are probably well advised to use a bio-filter to assist the conversion of ammonia to nitrite to nitrate.

Gary

I agree, which is why I said this earlier after rblaster85 let me know that this was the case for him:

I looked at the stuff at our buy back shop at the tip... huge piles of that and other trawler nets there - what put me off was that I did not know what plastics were used
Time to google again!

THese came up often when looking up trawler nets/gill nets and ghost nets:

monofilament nets
nylon
made of translucent, non-biodegradable plastic or nylon
made of a very strong monofilament (single strand) nylon mesh

Its all very UV stable and most of its indo we started sampling and putting together a data base to identify on colour, mesh, knott, type etc . Just be carefull as we getsome with lead weights , some with hitec ceramic weights and even some weighted with stones. wouldnt want lead in your AP system.But ive been thinking awhile that it would make a great high surface area free draining hard to clog biomedium for a seperate large biofilter light and cheap and making use of something that is sush a huge problem.OOppsss drinking too mussh.