Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Coming together mate...

2 more hours this morning and this is the result



right hand growbed will be on a pallet as I only had 3 IBCs and I'm keeping the final cage complete for the fishtank.

The sleeper goes across diagonally to offer more support through the middle as the pallet didn't feel strong enough to not sag at full load.

I now have to cut down the cage on the pallet so it's not so high, cut the top out of my fishtank and give it a good clean...

Is yor sump a whole ibc?
If it is you could make the sump your fishtank and use the other ibc for more grow beds
If not please ignore this post.
Im on my phone so the pic is tiny and cant see properly

No it's about 2/3 of an IBC. I cut a 40cm grow bed and what was left became the sump.

Pulled the whole thing apart and started painting all my ibcs. The landlord was nice enough to leave a couple of big paint tins with paint matching the house in the shed so I figured I'd colour coordinate :-)

Tomorrow I have to do the second coat, rebuild the supports and start plumbing. I'm hoping to have at least one bed plumbed in and filled with media so I can start cycling.

getting exciting mate

ugh it's bucketing down rain again I'm so annoyed.

looked up the weather forecast and it's supposed to rain today and tomorrow. I got the shits and dragged all the growbeds, sump and fishtank under the carport and painted them there... I'm gonna get this system cycling this long weekend...

Lol. I built my large system during that month and a half of rain we had a few months back. A few days of rain is nothing

kinda sux when one of my biggest leftover jobs was painting the damn things... but that's done now.

I'll give the FT another coat tomorrow after i give everything another pressure cleaner blast with some detergent...

It still has some (olive)oil remnants in it and I was going to leave it but bunson made a good point in another thread that the oil may coat the media and other surfaces and prevent bacterial growth.

I don't think it would be enough of an issue with fish and I'd test the system with some goldies first anyway.

turns out the rain for the past 24 hours means the humidity stayed so high the paint is still wet.

This is killing you isnt it TCshad

lol yeah i can't do anything during the week as I get home after dark and was hoping to have it up and running over the long weekend... Technically I was home friday to monday but I only got 1.5 days worth to work on it.

I ended up going out and pressure cleaning all of the internals of the growbeds, sump and FT and I placed the sump and FT in their positions. Can't put the growbeds up as the wet paint would run off into the sump... But at least this way I'll collect some rainwater for the system with no chlorine in it...

If I get enough water I'll throw the pump in to circulate and aerate the water in the sump and add a few drops of ammonia to get it cycling.

Finally got some time to work today. I set up the rear growbed with a constant flood style drain as I didn't want to stuff with an autosiphon today and filled it with some gravel. Started pumping sump to growbed for now as I still don't have a fitting to pipe the SLO out of the fishtank. Stopping past hardware & general tomorrow to try and fix that.

Water is very murky today as I was too lazy to wash the gravel properly. I figured it'll sort itself eventually. I have some cloth nappies at my pump outlet and some socks over the drain back to the sump to filter any big solids... As soon as the water clears I'll throw some goldfish in.

Tomorrow I'll try to get a second growbed running and hopefully at least get the SLO plumbed. Starting to think that my pump won't have the oomph to run the system.

Im looking forward to seeing it up and running