Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Long story short - may fill in with some photos and details of the old stuff later.
Bought a house, had a 2m x 3m indoor garden bed thing, cat loved the new house with its inside toilet. Needless to say that didn't go down very well with the cat's attendants.

What to do with a 2m x 3m x 0.6m concrete hole in your lounge? Built a formply deck, and a sort of coffee table with a hole in it to support a 500 litre moulded pond liner. Surrounded it with rocks and plastic plants and had 4 koi in it with an off the shelf biofilter.

Ongoing problems with protein film, and weird earthy smells and an awful lot of water changes required meant the fish moved outside into a pair of bathrubs with some water plants in the top one.

Moved house, built a bigger biofilter using fibreglass flower pot, bought the fish a 1000l plastic tank. This system ran well for a while, but one of the plants started taking over, I got tired of cutting it back and cut all of that plant off. This caused a crash when the stumps started rotting. There is a photo of this original system below, At that stage I had no idea I should not be using any sort of cement or limestone, so those reconstituted blocks you see there are no longer in the system.

At this point I realised we needed a better way to grow plants. Some googling brought me to BYAP and Cheidys Aquaponics with the intention of just buying a grow bed. The family was squeamish about having our pets and our food in the same tank, so we ended up buying a courtyard system and integrating it with our existing 1000 litre tub. I figured having a huge volume of water meant things would change slowly so I could pick up on any sort of biological imbalance before it became a big issue. 2000 litres of water means we can expand the system if we wish to.
We wanted full access to the grow bed and a good view of the fish, so we split the system, elevated the growbed on the lawn and used 90mm stormwater for the return.

I was quite taken by the idea of Affnan's siphons, so I remodelled the standard kit drain to an Affnan siphon. I found that a PET lemonade bottle worked well as the accelerator at the top, I cut the top of the lid out and overtightening the lid expands it to fit tightly in 25mm PVC.

It's been running for about 2 months now, It's been running in constant flood until now to get the seedlings established. We just bought a random assortment from bunnings and threw them in after rinsing the dirt off just to get something growing.
We're having wet weather for the next few days so I but the siphon bell back on this morning.

Our tap water has a PH of 8 so the plants arent doing very well yet, I'm happy to wait for the cycle to bring the PH down slowly.

A month ago I stripped our biofolter down and rinsed the elements out into the tank and growbed.
The pump that was running it was a rather espensive, low noise one so I converted my 40mm pressure line to run off that. The biofilter was chock full of thin red worms, so I guess our system is reasonably healthy. What isnt shown in the pictures is the main filter media, I used a combination of plastic pot scourers and clay house bricks.

Can anyone ID my big pump? It doesn't flow as well as I expected, it doesnt like the backpressure very much at all. I'd like to get a spare to have ready on the shelf.

I am aware we have a bit too much sunlight on our tanks, we really enjoy watching the fish so we are hoping it's not going to be much of a problem. I modified an ornamental pot for sweet peas, which I will train up the concrete column and along the patio to help shade the tanks a bit more.

System is populated with three koi, one monster black goldfish, 16 silver perch fingerlings and today I put one blue yabby in to clean up the food the silver perch miss. The Yabby is mainly a tester to see if crustaceans are happy, I really want to grow some marron eventually.

I'm a bit worried about all the algae in the tanks, I think that is where all of our nutrients are going.

Dammit, all my photos in the above post are in reverse order, oh well.

Here are the fish, and the algae growth in the tanks at 8 weeks old.
There is a lot of garbage in the bottom of the tank, I'll let the yabby settle in before scooping it out.

We havent had a single fish death, I was expecting several. I have dosed the water with about 2.5ppt salt.

The plants in the growbed really dont seem to be doing well.

We want to add a second growbed, I'm in two minds on how to go about it.
Option A: Dig a sump into the lawn and do a CHIFT PIST.
Option B: Extend the 90mm pipe, I will need to dogleg it to get it under a path. I'm worried about overflowing the standpipes off it if both beds dump at once.

Hi, just going to bump this back up to see if you can get some advice on the bed addition as well as find out what the big pump is . Someone can probably help you figure out a pump that will do the same as that one if no one knows and you need it. A short description of the current system and the order of flow could help with figuring out the bed addition.

Cheers

Thanks mate. Pump in beige tank feeds a 40mm pressure line.
Blue tank has a 25mm feed off the pressure line throttled with a ball valve and overflows into the beige tank.
Pressure line has a tee with 13mm valve to the sweet peas still in constant flood for now. They drain straight into the beige tank.
Another 13mm valve for future use in the pressure line.
At the end of the pressure line is another 25mm valve which feeds the GB.
GB has a 25mm siphon with two elbows under the GB. This points into the open end of 90mm storm water pipe which sits on top of the brick wall. Static water level in the 90mm is about 70mm below the top. Flowing level is about 40mm from the top.
The other, lower end of the 90mm just pokes over the side of the beige tank.
When the GB siphon trips it flows quite fast, it sucks some air into the 90mm and spills into the FT at an angle swirling the tank.

Each FT is 1000 litres.

2nd GB is going on the other side of a path which is where I was standing to take the plants photo. I would tee into the drain pipe and run the extension below ground to the new GB.

Seems like either option would work and you could always switch to Constant Flood on one or both beds if the drain pipe overflows by doing the second option

I looked around and couldn't find anything quite like the pump you have . You might see if the outer cover can be taken off, maybe the motor has a name plate with manufacturer and model.

Update. Ammonia levels are creeping up a bit, but it's time to harvest the trout.
The trout have starved out the silver perch, only one has survived. I'm going to restock with Perch and not bother with the trout again.
We lost a couple of trout in the last few days too. water temp is getting a bit high though, reaching 20 degrees at times.

Thinking about adding another growbed and reconfiguring the system.

from the inside. The beetroot has taken over and I know I need to cull the tomatoes but the nutrient buildup needs to be dealt with before I rip too many plants out.

Sweet peas have gone crazy. Thinking of replacing them with a passionfruit.

We want to get rid of our lawn and upgrade the system with one more growbed, leaving the beige tank where it is but using the blue tank as a sump laid out to allow the ability to add another two growbeds and a 2000 litre fish tank in future.

Not sure how I can run a constant height fish tank lower than the sump without it being too complicated. Looking for suggestions on how to do this without risking overflows or adding too many points of failure

Beetroot really need to be harvested, but I need to get the fish numbers down (and in my belly) first.
Too many fish for one growbed and the system is suffering, our giant goldfish died yesterday.

I'd like to rotate the growbed 90 degrees once the tomatoes are done and put the two growbeds end-to-end.
How long can I leave a growbed drained to allow me to move it before causing too much damage to the ecology in it?

Currently thinking I'll take the easy way out, do a second growbed where I originally planned, constant flood so the drain can be small bore and levels dont fluctuate any more than they do now. Everything else stays where it is.