Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi there,

I have been reading the forums for the last three years slowly preparing to build my system. We lived in Alabama, then Scotland, and now finally South Carolina where we finally bought a house and I was able to build my system.

I will be posting pictures soon but the basics of my system is 1 x 330gallon ibc that feeds an 8 ft x 4ft x 12in deep wooden growbed that has a pond liner. My grow media is lava rock ( scoria ). I have a 150gallon rubbermaid sump underneath the growbed with a 500 gph pump. I am buying catfish this thursday and the wife has plants about ready to go in.

I do have one question. My pump empties into the top of my ibc and aerates the water. I have 3 pvc pipes that let the overflow go into the growbed. The question is will the water naturally circulate from the entire tank once fish are in the system, or will the growbed only be receiving the water at the top of the tank?

Love the forum and I will be posting pics soon.

Josh

Hey josh.... wilmington, nc here


if your flow from the ST is pointing down into the IBC, then it will stir up the water... if you find that it doesnt, extend the pipe down to the bottom and add a venturi to it...

JT

Hi Josh, welcome to byap forums. The fish will circulate the water some. I think you will find the solids (fish poo ) settle on the bottom. You may be better off running pipes from the bottom of the ibc upto the holes you have for overflow into growbeds. Use a T with one leg pointing straight up to prevent airlock and or siphoning tank dry. I am sure someone will come along and explain it better than I or have a better idea.

Hi there, Thanks for the advice. I really like your system. You are crazy methodical in the way you folded your pond liner! It looked really nice.

hahahahah just like it neat... LOL....

gotta look good to show people....

jT

Hey Josh,

Good to see a long term lurker up and posting...

If I understand you correctly in how your system works, perhaps you might want to look at using a SLO (Solids Lift Overflow) Arbe has a great example here viewtopic.php?p=266196#p266196

Then you are sucking solids off the bottom.

Thanks All,

I have added SLO and it works like a charm. I am planning on picking up some catfish tomorrow and start getting the system cycled. I will post pictures soon.

There a lot of us in South Carolina doing aquaponics. I thinks its addictive.

Pictures!!! Sorry it took me so long.












Since that was taken I revamped the system and added slo venturi as well as an air pump and stones.





The picture below is right after the algae bloom and above was today now that most of the algae is gone.











I put two algae eaters in when the algae was at its worst. not sure if they are helping or not.



leaves are a bit wilty, not sure if that is from the heat or what.





I have been adding some liquid iron to help with the yellow leaves.

Just fyi the levels in my tank are usually pretty stable at:

PH-7.2
Ammonia - .25 ppm
Nitrites - 0 ppm (I haven't seen any nitrates in the system for a while. I had a strong reading before I got fish and it started dropping off so I went ahead and put the catfish in and it hasn't come back since then.)
Nitrates - 20-40 ppm

I have about 35 fish in the tank. I would like to add some more growbeds but I am unsure how to do that to this system. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I found some potential growbeds by using the pontoons from an old paddle boat!

You may need to raise the FT a bit higher then you could have another grow bed to the left of the existing one. and have to add in some more pipe work.

Great looking setup!
Can you construct another bed on the other side? Or extend your outlet pipe to another bed?