Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Initially, I couldn't decide between building a wicking bed and an aquaponics one. But then I thought to myself:




So first I built a pond for the aquaponics. It looks tiny in the pictures, but it's around about the 1500L mark and it's got small red native fish in it at the moment, but I'll be putting some rainbow fish into it as well.
I'm a vegetarian, so I've got no interest in growing fish to eat. Plus, I don't really want to have to feed the fish all the time as this somewhat defeats the purpose of having aquaponics to me. For me it's about not being as reliant on having to buy food and thus reducing your carbon footprint a bit.

That's also the reason that I decided to run my system off a solar panel only. It's a 24V 24W pump that's connected straight to a shattered solar panel (that I tried to fix with casting resin, as you can see, it wasn't a great success).

I know that all of this will mean that my nutrient levels are lower and my plants aren't going to grow quite as well as some of yours, but that's a price that I'm willing to pay.

Both the wicking bed's and the aquapoinics bed's internal dimensions are 2300mm by 1200mm, with the wicking bed being around 500mm deep and the aquaponics 300mm (gravel depth).

Currently, my system is looking very sad as I had to pull everything out of the ground and leave it out while I built the beds. The capsicums are the worst and look nearly dead, but I'm fairly sure that they'll make a full recovery.

So this is my low cost, low maintenance system now. I'm hoping that the water will clear up somewhat, but if it doesn't, I might have to consider throwing in some mussels as well.

Any comments or even critique is welcome!

I've planted more stuff today and will now have to really restrict myself in order not to overcrowd my grow beds!

But I've also got two issues that I wanted to address:

• My water is murky from accidentally dropping clay into the pond when I built it.
• Since my system is running off a solar panel, there's a risk that the pump stops just before the siphon kicks in and my plants drown because the roots are flooded.

In order to address both of these issues at once, I thought I'd get some geo-cloth (don't know if that's the actual name) and put it into a PVC pipe that goes to the bottom of the grow bed and then put the filling hose inside of that.
This means that if the pump stops, the water will slowly feed back through the filling hose, as the line is charged already.
And in early tests it seemed like some small quantities of suspended solids were being filtered out by the geo-cloth. Whether it's significant or not is yet to be seen, but it's an encouraging start.