Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks Dr Bee, I've just finished reading your thread (amongst a few others), since I'm only just over an hour north of Bunbury here and it's a similar climate - hotter and colder than most of Perth in respective seasons.

I'm now convinced SPs are the way to go for me since I'll be the only one eating them most of the time, and sharing half a batch of trout or barra at the end of each season would be a tiny bit sad.

My plans are still restricted to my scribbles at the moment, my OH dashed my Sketchup ideas as he apparently has something "much better" from his engineering days that he wants to use.
Also, apparently serious designs should not be done on a piece of card with my son's textas... But they were right next to me - and I was waiting for something else - what's a girl to do?

I will try and find my embarrassingly awful picture when I get home to upload. I had a new thought on the returns to the FT though. These are quite possibly going to be cheaper than plain spigots/scuppers:


(sorry to link to another site, I don't quite know how to add a saved image yet! Hope it works)

This could start looking a bit outrageous yet...

I've found some blue (and black) tubs too which I'm going to use as growbeds so they will be split with each having their own plumbing. I really need the picture for it to make sense I think. They are only $5 each and just 200L - brand new, so no contamination issues. Looks to me like a blue barrel in rectangle form? They are 1.3m x 0.45 x 0.3ish (little more maybe)

The pic will show 3, but I read a number wrong and will actually need 4 to make up my 800L of beds I've since realised. It will all depend on the size of the eventual FT. I was too slow to get the one I was originally coveting.

Is it a bad sign that I'm buying 10 x 200L tubs with the only half-masked intention of keeping the others for "storage" and "party ice tubs"??? That's potentially 2000L of growbeds in future - eeeep!

Aha! I found the picture-adding bit. Must scroll down further in future.



These are my potential FT return spouts. I also found these though, so there are a few options around.

gah - only 3 pics at a time...
these were the other two spouts. They get increasingly gaudy as the list goes on haha

You might find that the spouts don't allow enough water through. When a syphon kicks off, it dumps a lot of water, very quickly. I've got a 90mm stormwater pipe, and it's too much flow for it.

Also, don't use any made of metal, it'll end badly.

And my drawing aren't usually any more involved than a sharpie on a random piece of paper. My wife usually wants something pretty, she only ever gets a bad drawing.

Mine will be running constant flood so I'm hoping that between the separate 3-4 GBs the flow won't be too intense. But I had thought the same thing, so either way they'll be near enough to the last thing I add.
My girly side just can't help but indulge in the pretty bits while I'm waiting for the real planning to kick off.


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Bless you for giving consideration to Final Presentation!

You should consider searching "pondscaping" to get some ideas for creating something that is beautiful, not just functional. Search "aquatic marginal plants" to find decorative plants that can liven up any and every corner of your system. Stone is also a great addition to a pondscaping project, but obviously not ideal if you'll be moving so soon. You can also find rolls of flexible pond tubing - they run a little higher than PVC, but you can save on fittings, eliminate sharp corners, and make more easily concealed pipe runs.

Instead of plumbing back to the pond, consider draining from GB to "streamlets" that return water to the pond via lined trenches. These can have gravel or stones for aesthetic (and biofilter) purposes, and can be planted as well. You can put your grow beds anywhere you want, and then have them drain back to pond or sump along 1 or more attractive watercourses.

For better free-hand sketching, get a 4x4 or 5x5 ruled graph composition book. Easy for marking off measurements, and keep all your drawings in one place. If the site has a grade, take measurements and plot it on graph paper so you can see the lay of the land at a glance. Use a water hose level for measuring grade or leveling two spots at any distance from each other.

You could use brass features like that as long as they had stainless steel pipes and the water flowed so that it didn't contact the brass (or bronze).

Also while flow through one of two maybe a problem if you had a whole wall of beared faces it would be impressive when the siphon kicked on.

Oh, and they're all resin. I wasn't sure what metals might do to my readings over time.

In other news, I found my drawing. Totally not to scale, and I let my son add some fish and himself fishing in there, and he drew in the 'dirt' for me too. It's just the concept drawing so that I could explain it to my OH.

Hopefully at some stage today I can convince him to make a start on the proper drawing which will be a lot more technical and will have all the final design details. This should give you a bit of an idea though


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I'm impressed at the effort put into the clay pebbles.

The fish look happy

I've never seen a whale powered AP system.

I'll keep tuned

Haha I'm hoping they get that big too! I just noticed that he actually put full sets of fins on them. That's why he's the fish 'expert' in his class I guess!


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Hey katmac welcome to the fun side,
How's your system looking and any pics so far,
I stated with goldfish just to make sure my water was safe

Eck, progress has stalled. I can't pick up my growbed inserts until this weekend, and until I see them in the flesh I don't want to mess with measurements. Hopefully tomorrow I will have some pics for you all!

Still sourcing a decent sized pond as I didn't have transport to get organized for the last one I found on gumtree. Probably other APers that are pipping me at the post

Will update soon with pics and progress! Watch this space...


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I know they say Rome wasn't built in a day, but jeeeez, if I wait for the OH to build me his spiffy version of this picture I will never get anywhere. So while he's procrastinating I've been trying to learn a bit about this Sketchup business...

Please don't look at it too closely. The scale is roughly right, but not 100% and it's a quick job.

I get to hopefully pick up the pond this week, which comes with a filter, though I'm not yet sure how big it is, and what brand. Looks like I will get a few Koi thrown in as well which I guess is a bonus. Their little whiskers do nothing for me though, so once I get my SP in there I might be looking to sell or swap some Koi in a few months!!

The biggest set back has been my grow beds. 3 weekends in a row I've been told I can't pick them up. So fingers and toes and eyelashes are crossed that construction will start this weekend. There will be 5x approx 200L growbeds, and looks like I will have about 1500L of pond, maybe more. I'm still going to go pretty light on the stocking initially, and see how both the fish and plants handle it. If growth is slow I'll add more, until things start ticking along in sync.

So, here goes with the sketchup:
(edit - no go. try a screen dump...)
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