Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

not as yet -FJ
knew here was something else to do!
bugger thought there was just washing cleaning pumping shopping cooking taxiing eating planing computing soon there will be sleeping
no time for any other, ing.
tommorow is a chance

Fizzyj, thats looking fantastic..... Great to see you've got things so far down the track.. That looks like one of Marks tanks is it, from rainfill??

Just one thing that I can see you that may end up causing a bit of a problem. The main common drain pipe looks like it may be a little undersized. I would go for something like 90mm downpipe so that the flow can never be restricted by the size of the pipe..

I really like the way that you have the tank on the veranday, and the beds around the corner..... Top work....

Yes one of rainfills tanks. Couldn't believe their service, ordered it on monday delivered on Friday - a custom built tank - unbelievable. Some organisations could learn something from these people.

Anyone looking at some of the poly tanks around the 1400L to 2000L should seriously consider a metal tank as they are around the same price.

I had the same thoughts about the size of the drain as I think I will have a few bottlenecks with it. The drain pipe in each drum is only filled by 2 8mm holes. I figured 4 drums per 19mm pipe would probably be ok, but if not I can also double the drain pipes to the sump.

However thinking about it now, and remembering some of your pictures, the idea of the 90mm pipe is probably a good one and would have involved less connections and therefore less cost (damn it)...
I had originally thought this had something to do with the auto siphon so had avoided it.

Thanks

Excellent work FJ, fantastic pics.

I'm almost ready to start cycling the water in my next system, I'll save the details for its own thread, but have spent the past 3 days washing pea gravel, so I can empathise with you.

For the labour and mess involved, if I had my time over I would have bought expanded clay. Depends on how much you need though as it is pricey at retail rates. Still needs to be washed of course but nowhere near as much as the pea gravel. My hands look like those of a 90 year old.

IMO - once the rock washing is done and the beds are full thats all of the crappy jobs behind you, its on to the fun stuff now

Great Progress, looks very neat. I can't wait till those funds come in
to start mine off.

You asked in a previous post what the cost of freight for the silvers from the eastern states. There is a place up in Bagingara (past GinGin) called Arcadia Aquaculture. EB mentioned it in a previous post. It would work out a bit cheaper I'd imagine.

http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/vie ... ht=arcadia

By the way, how many litres was that tank? How much did it set you back if you don't mind me asking...

1.5m dia ~ approximately 1400L just over $500 delivered with one tap.

Yeah I have a tough decision ahead of me. Metal tank or fibreglass. That sounds like a very good price though. I love the look of them.

Pumps have arrived from Murray and as expected they both work fine. Looks like lots of fun times ahead of me.

coupla big suckers there!!

An update on the system progress with a few problems:

First I will describe what is happening in this system:

Third picture is of the fish tank with red arrow pointing to the water flow out and blue arrow pointing to the flow back in. You can see that the pump is controlled by a float switch.

Second picture is of the grow beds with a header tank for one side. The 4 beds on the left (blue arrow) are controlled by autosyphons. The 4 beds on the right are controlled using a pipe within the drain pipe to mark the correct depth to fill to. Each inner pipe has 2 small holes at the bottom to drain the water out at a slow rate. These also start to drain as soon as they start to fill up. As the pump from the fish tank is switched on it begins to fill all 8 beds and the black header tank.

First picture is of the drain pipe with the green arrow pointing to the inner drain.

Fourth picture is of the drain tank, which has another float switch activated pump to pump back to the fish tank. (another post)

4th Picture

My problem:
I cannot get it to cycle on a regular basis.
The crux of the problem is that the fish tank pump hasn’t switched off before the drain tank pump has switched on, thus creating a continuous flow of water through the beds. With the size of these suckers (pumps) I really don’t want them to be on continually.

What have I tried:
First I had all beds using the same principle as the beds on the right, ie pipe within drain pipe. Problem was that they wouldn’t fill up at the same rate, hence the green valves now installed on each of the beds inlet pipes and at least one would overflow due to a faster flow in than flow out.

Secondly I switched all beds to an autosyphon method – which worked really well, except that I was getting a full cycle every 7~8 mins. – Too fast in my opinion. Also both pumps would be operating at the same time, so I slowed down the flow rate of the drain pump. This enabled the 7 minute cycle.

Both methods above did not have the black header tank.

Third try was to use a header tank that would *possibly* help with getting more water out of the fish tank so that it’s pump would switch off before the drain pump was triggered. I put the header tank on the beds to the right only, which meant I had to change these beds back to the pipe within the drain as opposed to the autosyphon. This almost worked but the problem still remains that the drain pump is triggered before the fish tank pump has switched off.

I have obviously fiddled with the float switch but have not been able to get a smaller on/off cycle.

Now I am after suggestions as this is getting frustrating.

However my next attempt may be to put 2 blue barrels on the roof as new header tanks, which hopefully get filled up very quickly from the fish tank and then switch off.. These will then drain fairly slowly into the grow beds, possibly all being changed back to pipe within a drain. They can then drain into the drain tank. What do people think.

Alternatively the blue barrels could be on the roof between the drain tank and fish tank as opposed to before the grow beds. Either way means I cut up a lot of what I have already done.

Fizzy J,

I have the same pumps as you, and while they seem okay, I think for my application, they just don't fill the growbeds fast enough. The sump one is fine but I will be buying a bigger litre per minute pump for the fish tank. 140 lpm that these pumps are rated at is not quite enough for my application. I have gate valves on each bed to adjust the flow, but they need to be open fully to get any action, hence negating their benefit of even water distribution over the beds. Good luck sorting it all out.

You could enlarge your drain tank capacity by connecting another blue barrel piped together at the bottom side. That will help with your return pump cycling less. For a longer bed fill drain cycle, have you tried diverting some of your flow directly back into your fish tank? Looking very nice by the way!

Monya,
I am pretty happy with the flow rate, as it fills up pretty quick. I calculate that i have about 240L of water required to fill the 8 grow beds, which at 140LPM this should be done in 2 minutes. It sure takes a bit longer than that.

GF,
I had thought about putting in a second/larger drain tank, however I think I will then have the problem of it filling up to lets say 80% of the required float trigger point and thus not triggering which then doesn't allow for the fish tank float to re-trigger to start the cycle again.

However based on the estimated 240L required, I could with the use of 2 drain tanks get the float to trigger at about the 200L+ mark, which would then just operate a single trigger per cycle for the drain tank. That could work.

Previously I had discounted the idea as I was operating on the basis that I needed to ensure the drain tank was empty at the end of the cycle so that the fish tank was full enough to re-trigger. To achieve this I had the float setup for several short bursts of water per cycle. If I can manage 1 pump out of the drain per cycle, it might be long enough for the fish tank pump to switch off.