Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Good point. Will watch for water wastage from it.

Thats the idea, UT.

i'd say F&D over cont. flow for sure.

siphon loop is an easy way to get started, then progress on to the bell siphon

welcome and have fun

Hi UT,
Always take murphy`s law into account too

I `m a bit concerned about the syphon and the feed pipe being outside the tank. I snagged your pic and modded a little to make it murphy-proof. Any leaks can only go back to the fishtank, overflowing is covered too.

Not to scale of course..the overflow looks like 6" dia pipe but 1.5" pipe would be plenty and still allow room for the feedpipe.

Hey Ute,
Your system is nice and simple, the only thing to check would be that the amount of water needed to fill the grow bed doesn't lower the fish tank level too much. You can find out how much water you'll need by measuring how much water it takes to fill up a bucket of known volume filled with your medium of choice.

The pipe outlet can empty out right on top of the media, just don't have it coming out too fast and splashing too much and it would be OK. Make sure to have some kind of overflow drain too just in case. And if the siphon outlet isn't over the water then maybe put in some gutter-type-thing so any dripping won't go on your floor.

Another way to try it would be to use a standpipe drain and a timer. Either style would work well - the flood and drain action is what you're after.

Edit - What Hex said. Another way to try it would be like a small system AquaMad made once, where the pipe from the pump was also the drain; when the pump shut off the water would siphon back down the pipe through the pump and back into the fish tank. Thay way you only have one pipe (and an overflow).

How does it spin? Is there a special fitting that allows the arms to rotate? Or did you diy it? (and do you think the fitting would leak if you ran it rotating vertically, rather than horisontally?)

It's a special fitting. It basically takes water from an input above, and distributes it to 4 outlets. I haven't taken one apart to see exactly how it spins without leaking, probably some form of magic?

It worked really well for an old open air sump filter as it evenly spread the water over a good circle of media.

UT, sounds like you have previously had a working system or at least a prototype... happen to have any pictures of the older system???

Or at least a picture of the "spinner" and description of the old system???

Oh the older system was actually a series of 9 breeder fishtanks all going to a single sump filter via overflows. Was a really good setup, was thinking once I've got this aquaponics game figured out I'll set the breeding tanks back up.

We used them to grow redclaw crayfish for our turtles. I'd actually love to rig up some aquaponics to the turtle tank's filtration as they're filthy buggers, so the plants would love it.

Will see if I've got some pics of the old setup.

Here it is pre-spinner. The green is pumped water from the sump, the red is overflowed water. It worked pretty well, but being very open it tended to waste water and was pretty ordinary in the house. In a shed it would be much better.

Here's a picture of one of my other tanks.



Unfortunately the catfish didn't acclimatise well to the water and didn't make it

pity about the catfish lol.....

Obviously in the know about the nitrogen cycle of aquariums... so you'll have no trouble adapting to AP..... your bath tub/growbeds just effectively become your bio-filter unit(s) for all your tanks and return the filtered water back....

Only thing you need to come to terms with is the nature of flood and drain..... unlike an aquarium filter which stays wet (usually) and requires periodic cleaning and replacing... the "flood and drain" growbed filter allows the plants to extract the nitrates, oxygen, trace elements etc needed for growth from the fish solids/wastes/nutrient waters during the "flood" cycle.... the drain cycle allows the plants roots to take up the oxygen needed (which they would normally get from within the soil) and to dry out enough that the system stays aerobic and doesn't stagnate and become anaerobic... leading to root rot and disease....

Get your head around the principle of syphons and your 99% there....

The rest should come pretty naturally to you.... and if turtles are dirty kritters then yep, they're darn good candidates for an AP system.

Here's some pictures of what I've done so far. It's only an experimental setup, so I'm not too worried about clogging or overflows etc. I just want to prove it to myself before I get really serious.

more pictures...

About nails the whole concept I reckon UT....

Keep us updated... well done.

With the seedlings on the floating poly, they'll grow through without intervention right? I don't need to poke a hole or two through? I figure with the lids on it'll be pretty moist in there so will probably be enough for the roots to find their way down ?

I left a bit of soil on the roots to try and help keep them upright and stable, but some of them just lie flat, will be interesting to see if they manage to upright themselves.