Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

With 800lts of gb space and 1500lts of fish tubs, ur system will handle plenty of heavy feeding veges. If you get them from Glenwaters, your silvers should grow in harmony with ur produce, if it is silvers u intend to use. Look fwd to seeing things evolve.

Feels great to eat from a AP system GG

Hi,

A story of good luck.

System happily running now for 6 months. Killed a few more fish than I would have liked. Killed a gew more plants than I would have liked while salting water to save fish. Ce La Vie.

About a month ago, it occurred to me that I should do a risk assessment on likely failure points. Weakest link in the system was my main pump - I had spares or alternatives of all other fish and plant essentials, so headed for Ebay. Not in a hurry, so I could keep bidding on the item I wanted at the price I wanted to pay. Finally won it, and it arrived on Thursday.

Fast forward 48 hours. Out enjoying the mild conditions before turning in last night. Hmmm something's not quite right here - a little too quiet, and what is that smell. Timer switch light on, but no pump. Went to check pump - nearly glowing it is so hot.

HSM.

Not really air pumps running. The fish will live to the morning. 45 minutes to change pump over (messy because of early plumbing poor design meant that I could not isolate tanks) Happy Fish Happy Plants.

Don't know why pump failed yet - didn't have time to tear it down today. But I recently upped my daily pump cycles to cope with the coming high temperatures.

Moral of the story - take time regularly to review your system. What could break, what would the consequences be and what measures can you take to help your fish survive.

I was lucky this time.

Cheers

gg

Wise words GG.... nimble bit of footwork there mate, well done.

that was close mate

but now you need another spare

Lucky for sure.

A risk management approach is a wise one.

Pumps and electricity are the two most risky areas in my view.

Electricity is coverred by a fail over system. I think the best way to cover pumps is to have redundancy built in. This is one of the reasons I like the type of desing I use - which as soon as I add the next grow-bed will have 2 (small) pumps running continuously and the system will be able to run off just one if the other fails. The autosiphon cycles will just be longer.

Steve S has 5 interlinked blue (green ) barrels running one small power head pump in each. pumps turn on sequentially to each bed, but the return water feed back to ALL barrels. thus if a pump fails then the only thing to suffer is one grow bed. quite simple in approach really.

I agree Steve - but I don't like the idea of these types of pumps, which are meant to run continuously, turning on and off all day.

have you had a bad experience?

i should set one up as a test, on a timer, to extreme limits, like on / off every 1 minute. see if we can get a MTBF

Steve,
If you test 3 pumps, one running continuously, one cycled at the rate recommended for flood & drain (15 min On : 45 min Off ) and the other with a 1 minute:3 minute cycle, to give the same running time as the other cycled pump, but 15 times the rate, to hopefully accelerate any cycling related failure.