Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The start of the obsession, the build , the testing and the expansion.
after watching joel on gardening australia in 2007 the brain went into overdrive, after working in the brewing industry and living on acerage, relying on take water, I accumlated a large amount of blue plastic drums and 1000L Ibc tanks. after 2 years of thinking droughts and possums eating everthing the build begun. ft 600L 50 jade perch, grow tube holds about 70L water flood and drain,plants grew well filtering not quite sufficient, had to drain of 150L of water of weekly, didnt mind as good summer rain have 50,000L of water in storage plants in gardens loved the extra watering. stage 2 to follow.

AP, Brewing and Queensland sounds like you should hook up with Axl, looking good Davo's

As I have worked as a maintenace trouble shooter in all industries for near 30 years, things can get complecated as I design (does my head in but cant stop it ). control system i designed is a float in the FT operating of 12 volt, can be adjusted up or down at ease,
this float switch triggers a 12 volt relay which activates all 240v power to panel, then triggers a timer that can be set to on for 1 sec of operation or a 100 hours, the system at presant is on for 2 1/2 min then off, water takes about 45 min to return before float is activated again, the FT is 600L and I have about 100L in the system somewhere that will return if pump fails, water reture flow to tank runs 24/7, I have also fitted a fine jet of water pipe into the FT when pump is operating to further assist in airation of the FT. stage 3 and final for now coming up.

system has been operating for about 4 months all going well 2 large grow beds were made from 1000L IBC tank by cutting centre out and folding iron over plastic internal tank to keep everything in place, water quality has been good since adding larger beds no need for water changes at this time, fish are very happy , also added black poly manifold in roof structure to keep water at fair temp, as night temps water levels were geting down to around 5 deg fish not feeding, day temp around 24 deg so running water through manifold has kept FT water around 12 Deg fish happy and hungry, next project will be backup have contactor in control box which is normaly closed when power on this will open when power goes off, am going to fit solar panel from caravan to charge battery connect to 12 DC to 240 AC invertor which will come on and power up system in same operation as if power was still on hope this goes well. thats about it for my system for now will keep posted with future upgrades.

So these are just various stages of the same system Davo???

Would be better to follow the progress if they were all merged into a single thread....

PM "Jaymie"... and she'll sort it out for you...

thanks for your sugestion rupertofoz jaymie has sorted it.

Went and saw Davo's system first hand the other day.
Great to see a working system,it was a great tour.
Nice guy,very passionate, very helpful with tonnes of info.
First time I have met an internet person in real life.
Will look forward to seeing the plants and fishes grow in the future.
and soon start growing some of my own.

Thanks snags,
It was also great to catch up with someone intrested in AP so close to home, thanks very much for kind comments, hope we can work together to get your obsession in AP up and running soon.