Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This is what my fishtank looks like at the moment. As you can see, I also laid fake rock liner around the top edge; ultimately I'm going to build a rock wall around the outside of the tank and there will be rock all around the rim and add a little waterfall.

I'd hate to take it all out and start over.

I suppose it's time to add some other pics, too.

The first bed I made much higher than it will be, ultimately, while I play with the siphon and figure out exactly how much vertical height I need below the bed and above the waterline of the fish tank. I hope I'm able to cut 10" or so off of those legs, or I'll need to build up a raised floor around the bed.

Okay, so first thing, DON'T PANIC. Everything will be okay. Leaks can be found and fixed. Anerobic zones in folds haven't really been a concern for people. Anerobic zones in general are usually present in every system, and, believe it or not, can actually be benificial in small ammounts.

I always wanted to garden with a bobcat, but you have an excavator!! Amazing system Tori, in a completely different climate than i have to contend with. I look forward to seeing it flourish.

Looks awesome lady! I love a build that starts with a track hoe. Don't worry about those folds.

Look at that serene location!!
Have you switched the water on yet?

Thanks everybody I'll try not to worry about the water behind the folds!

Yesterday was very exciting, I made an Affnan siphon, complete with an odd plumbing path up over the edge and into my fish tank, and not only did it work, it worked *the very first time*. I was in shock. +1 for siphons! I played with more water coming in, and it still worked. I played with less, and it worked. I played with the plumbing under the grow bed, and it still worked. I was under the impression that siphons are a fiddly pain-in-the-rump but so far that has not been my experience. I hope it stays that way.

Right now I have 70 or so feeder goldfish in my tank, and a pond filter going as a place to build up the bacteria until I can get all my grow beds online. I hope to have the first growbed full of LECA and totally ready for plants in a few days.

However, yesterday I found that a couple of my goldfish have Ich it made me regret buying feeder goldfish to start off. I salted a little more (it felt like I salted a lot, but I guess a couple pounds of salt into a system with 3000 gallons/11000l of water is nothing. So I looked online and found that I need to make the water much warmer to help kill ich - right now the water is between 61-65F/16-18C. I know the cold water will increase cycling time, but I didn't have a good way to heat that much water. Four big aquarium heaters that are designed to keep 100 gallon indoor tanks warm aren't cutting it.

So last night I built a poor-girl's heat exchanger, more as a proof-of-concept than a final addition to my system. I took a big pickle bucket (maybe 35-40 gallon-sized, I don't know for sure), drilled a hole for an overflow back into the fish tank, tossed a pump into my sump tank and am pumping water from the sump up into the bucket. Then I stuffed in about 80 feet/24m worth of PEX, and connected it to my home's wood/oil/propane hydronic heating system. After about an hour's worth of fighting to prime it and get the air out, I went to bed with it seeming to work - the PEX tubing going in was hot, the PEX coming out was warm, and that heat had to be going somewhere, right? This morning I found my 3000 gallons of water in the greenhouse to be about 70F... in about 8 hours. I guess I don't need a fancy and expensive stainless steel heat exchanger, the PEX works just fine.

I'll ultimately rebuild it so it's not so ugly, but for now the only thing I need to do is figure out how I'm going to turn OFF the heat when the water gets to 80F or so. I see two ways: I could add a solenoid valve of some sort to bypass the coil in the bucket, or I could turn off the pump which is pumping the water from the sump to the fishtank. The problem with the later is that I would end up with a bucket full of aquaponics water at maybe 150F. Do you think I'd get weird/unwelcome bacteria in water that warm? That's certainly the easiest solution, if it isn't going to cause a problem.

I can't just turn off the pump circulating water through the PEX since there is little length in between the greenhouse and my home that could, even though insulated, still freeze. Now that I've filled it with water, it has to stay on.

I should add that I used a uniseal for the very first time on my pickle bucket, and it was a total pain to get the 2" PVC through it. I couldn't do it - I found I was tearing up the uniseal rather than pushing the drain pipe through it. Since it was handy, I grabbed my heat gun and heated up the PVC for a couple minutes - just the very end - until it was just a tiny bit soft, and pushed it through the uniseal (well past where the PVC was hot). It made it SOOO much easier.

Change in plan, because of the Ich. I'm going to heat up the water to 84 and catch as many of the fish and bring them back to the store who has "Not for sale" now on their fish tank because they got ich too from the same batch of fish. I'll then heat the water up to 90 or so and keep it there while I fishless cycle for a couple weeks, killing the ich in the process, then I'll introduce the koi I really want to have in there. I'm sad, but at least it's not an infestation with nice big fish.

Good idea on the heat gun and uniseal. If you bevel the edges of the pipe down on a grinder, and then add a little dish soap or ky jelly, they'll slide right in. I like your pex exchanger, I will need something like this next winter. Great idea!

Hi Tori,

It's an awesome build you have there, well done on taking the plunge on such a great scale.


In your quote above you mention getting the the solids out from the sump and I see in your photos it appears that you are running the SLO down to the sump. I may be wrong in assuming that is the case and you might just have it there as a temporary measure, correct me if I'm wrong.

The SLO should run to the growbeds and then drain into the sump, then pumped from the sump back to the fish tank. That way your solids are filtered by the growbeds and then the clean water is returned to the fish tank.

Tori It's great to see such projects like yours and the Boss's systems take shape, well done guys.

Thanks for the comments! I am, in fact, letting the FT overflow into a sump tank and then pumping the water up into the grow beds and then letting the clean water flow back into the FT. I'm aware that I'll end up with two dirty tanks - the FT and the sump (to the extent that the SLO doesn't get them all from the FT and not all the solids will be sucked up by the pump in the sump).

However, I *really* wanted my FT to be in the ground. I want to look down into my fish pond; I want to have rock all around it, and a little waterfall, and some plants growing around it, etc. It is an important aesthetic choice I have to engineer the system around.

With the FT in the ground, I don't see how the FT could overflow into the GBs unless they were set well into the ground, and then I'd need to blast ledge to put the sump tanks where they'd need to be. Am I missing something? The fish tank water level is actually about 12" above ground, so that would help raise things up a bit, but still the GB plumbing would have to be underground and my sumps would have to be very shallow.

The other choice, and please correct me if there's another possibility, is to have a pump in the fish tank, with the risk that a plumping failure could result in pumping all the water out of the fish tank. Or a float switch failure, because I think I'd need a pump in the sump to pump the water back to the FT and I'd have to have some way to make sure one or the other pump doesn't get too far ahead of the other. That would greatly simplify my plumbing challenges - trying to get the water from the GBs into my FT when my FT is 12" off the ground means the GBs have to be a little higher than I'd like. But I thought a pump in the FT was generally frowned upon as an inelegant solution for aquaponics.

There will be more to my system than that: There's actually a second sump that some of the GBs will drain into instead of back into the FT, and there will be a second pump in the "clean" sump that will pump water into DWC beds and vertical towers, which will in turn flow back into the FT. So there is going to be a second pump anyway, but the design I'm envisioning won't need float switches to keep the pumps in sync.

I'm open to changing the design while I still can - I'm dry-fitting the plumbing now and building the tables.

Is FT->Sump, pumped to->GB->FT or FT pumped to GB->Sump pumped to->FT the better solution? I realize that an above ground FT -> GB -> sump pumped back up to FT would be ideal, but that only works when the FT is well above ground, right?

Thanks!

Hi Tori,

In your photos the fish tank looked too be a lot higher and I didn't realise that your water level is only 12" above the ground, that makes it a different ballgame.

With a pump in the fish tank, pump failure would not be a worry because the pump would be lower than anything else and would not drain the fish tank if it failed.

I'm not sure on how to synchronise your two pumps someone will chime in on that for you.

Tori another option would be to pump from the main fish tank up to the Gb's and then drain back into the fish tank with one pump and then have your two sumps connected together using them as a second fish tank pumping to your DWC beds and vertical towers then draining back to the sumps, that way there would be no problems synchronising pumps and do away with any float switches.

Using your sumps connected as a second fish tank you would have two separate systems running with no extra power cost than what you are thinking of now and somewhere for your next batch of fingerlings to start off.

Wow Tori very nice system!!! I to had a problem with ick but I salted the tank to kill it out. and thanks joblow for the info on the SLO. this whole time I've been running the slo back to the sump !!! no wonder my water is so dirty. Looking forward to many pics from you Tori. keep it up!!!

Fifteen days ago I scooped out all the fish, which was a nightmare and actually involved pumping out over 2000 gallons of water into temporary holding so I could catch the little buggers. I didn't have nearly a large enough fishnet at the time and the closest store that might have a larger one is an hour away. Live and learn.

I put the water back, checked the chemistry (Ammonia 0.25ppm Nitrites 0.25ppm Nitrate 0ppm). I dumped in some liquid seaweed, dumped in pure ammonia to 4ppm to start fishless cycling. I used some maxicrop, but since I only had a quart and I had nearly 3000 gallons of water to treat (including the sump) I also used about a quart of House & Garden Algen Extract which I use for my hydro systems. The Algen Extract contains some Ammonium Nitrate in addition to the seaweed, but I figured (I hope correctly) that would raise both the ammonia and nitrate levels and since I need nitrates and I'm dumping in ammonia anyway it wouldn't hurt anything. I hope that's true. As expected, the water turned black.

I transplanted a couple seedlings into my first growbed, and littered various areas with lettuce and some herb seeds and I ignored the system for nearly two weeks while I took my kids on vacation.

I came back today and the water is still black The ammonia was down to 1ppm, Nitrites are 0, and Nitrates are at about 10ppm. I assume that much of the nitrate level is from the Algen Extract, but I'm a little surprised that the nitrites are 0 but there's still ammonia. I wonder if the nitrobacter bacteria are keeping up with the nitrosomonas but the nitrosomonas are still chugging away at the ammonia? I wasn't here to see the nitrites spike but is it possible they won't?

I've brought the ammonia back up to 4ppm and will keep it there for a few days and watch and see what happens. I'd like to put in some fish in a couple days if things are going well.

I really hope the water clears up. I'm worried it'll be black until I change out all the water.

Plumbing you see in the pics is somewhat temporary.