Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Your sunlight looks adequate. I'd say plant stuff and see how they do. You may have lighter yield on 'fruiting crops', but you'll just have to try it.

Kcat,
EB and Faye have that laserlite type roof covering and have good growth

I have put up 50% shadecloth (as a ceiling) in my GH - this cuts down on sunlight and the plants thrive on it...I would say that you will have a plentiful supply of sunlight to grow just about anything in that area

So when ya gonna wash some gravel

Was hoping to do it this weekend. But I committed myself to the Engineers without borders conference for AP support, and I have family commitments on the Sunday

I really don't know, also I don't have a box trailer. And I still have half a day's worth of plumbing to do, and I want to bury a blue barrel vertically, which in our black clay will take at least half a day if not all of one. Especially with only recently half healed cracked ribs

Oh does the work ever stop?

You use ShadeCloth, is that cos you're in Brisbane? shadecloth sounds a lot cheaper than laserlight roofing... will it work so well in Melbourne I wonder?

ahh no matter, it'll be a long time before I get around to building that.

I use 70% shadecloth with greenhouse film underneath, to reduce the sunlight and to reduce the amount of rain inflow.

Some of my plants get alot of sun, but some areas only get a few hours of direct sun in the summer, and less in the winter. I've just been experimenting with what plants grow better in which part of the system. There are some plants that dont need much sun at all. You can always improvise with a trellace or string and climbing plants so that they can grow up to where the sun is.

I have had problems recently.

I'm using 1" pipe over a long distance, with not much fall.

I've got airlock problems, and I thought I'd let you all know how I've got rid of half my problems but not all.

Here is my first system. (abbreviated for this discussion)

My problems came in that the flow to the pond was too slow.

I could hear water running at the top near the header tanks, suggesting air near the 3/4" to 1" adapter. (it said 1/2" tophats in the drawing but they were 3/4")

I also found that one tank would fill to brimming, whilst the other had only managed to fill half way (using the 3/4" auto leveling)

so, I left the 3/4" in, but added 1" tank outlets on the bottom of the drums, so there were no restirctions.
I also piped the pump outlet into both tanks to even the flow.

Alas, i still found that the flow to the pond sucked.
The tanks fill nicely, but the flow is like 100L/hr hardly enough to get excited about.

So, I had a brainwave, and removed one of the pipes, making the fill pipe the same as the drain pipe.

This should have worked, as it will fill the header tanks, and push high pressure water through the pipe that will drain, flushing all the air out, and doing that every fill to make sure there are no airlocks.

The pump has a non-return valve, so the fish tank wont fill up again, but the pond and growbed will cycle.

eg:

As it turned out, I had to add flow limiters (taps) to the GB and pond, to stop all the pump flow going just to those devices.

And I had to turn them down, because the pond couldn't drain fast enough!!!!! I now have about 10 L/min (600 L/hr), rather than 100L/hr

so I am ecstatic! my only remorse is paying B for 50m of pipe I didn't need but still I am ebullient.

My only problem is that the left hand tank fills faster again so I think if I put the pump outlet equidistant between the two tanks that problem should go away.

So on that note, I'm off to bed. Perhaps I will get some gravel this weekend and make this system do what it's meant to!

A naive questions perhaps, but what's the purpose of the header tanks, especially now that you have ball valves controlling the flow to the growbed and the pond.

Why not just dispense with them altogether?

Why not exit the growbed to the pond you can run a 90 mm storm water pipe back to the fish tank $15 for 6 meters

my pump is BIG. it pumps [s]300[/s] 150 - 200L/min.
I can't drain that fast. My system is meant to be gravity fed. So I power-cycle my pump once every hour, for 3 minutes or there abouts.

If I run the pump for longer my sump IBC will be dry. If I restrict the flow from the pump, it will use more power... the pump is also noisy (in my world view anyhow) so I don't like it on all the time.

And I wanted the water feature / cascade on the pond to run all the time. So the header tanks are more like capacitors. They been added in to filter the input spikes from the pump, into a continuous flow.

Mainly because I've buried all those pipes already, and didn't want to dig them up. Also the GB to the pond is longer than to the sump. Also see the above post for continuous flow comments.

However draining from the pond is still a minor issue, so I may have to do some digging anyhow. but I ws hoping the 2" I had bought was going to be sufficient. Do I need 90mm?

90MM is cheap go as big as you can fit in but first sit down and think and only dig once[i only use 50 mm when all beds are overflowing it just copes]

ok, 90mm from the GB down to the sump then... I can do that. Thanks for the tip.