Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Good morning.
I'm almost ready to head up north for 100 Brook Trout fry. I've had the usual setbacks in design as well as managing to cut my hand using a holesaw in a drillpress yesterday.
I'm back in the ER
To the tune of:
Back in the U.S.S.R. (Yeah)

Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Yeah it wasn't a bad cut, a little mangled around the edges, with little blood and no pain.
I spent my life practicing what I call the Zen Art of Physical Labor.
This is the first time I cut myself in forty years as a tradesman and craftsman. Oh well what are ya gunna do?
In the meantime I had an idea after I couldn't make an airlift filter work quickly as we were supposed to leave today to pickup fish 200 miles away.
I've had a inexpensive 12 volt bilge pump a friend gave me twenty or so years ago.
All I needed to do is cut away all the mounting and housing for it so the pump would fit into a 3" thick wall S&D PVC pipe. No problem for the Brianizer.
Dremal tool in hand and safety glasses on my face, I cut away the cage around the little pump leaving only the swirl chamber for the impeller.

This if I don't say so myself was a really good idea. I also cut the filter housing PVC pipe so the outflow of the pump pushed the FT water back out to the tank instead of trying to lift the water with an airlift through the snorkel support system.
Thus, I could avoid having water in the structural plastic pipes holding the filter in place through an existing hole in the tank. Using the snorkel pipe instead for air only will allow air lines and the 12 volt DC leads to come out of the tank with out water pressure putting water out of the tank and into the Jetta TDI back seat where this system will ride.

I needed to test the pump overnight to see if the idea was going to pan out.

Around Ten PM I went out to the Koi pond opening the moving bed biofilter and snipped off a short piece of the filter media I have in there as well as K2 biomedia. I employed the cycled media filter material in this new filter to jump start the tank.


Our house feels so large now that we have three unfinished new rooms to work in. Somehow I found myself in the AP greenhouse and amazingly saw why my big air pump isn't performing like it did when new.
I had a pipe interface between the PEX Sharkbite fittings to air line pipe barb fitting and it was bent over completely shutting off the flow of air to everywhere except the MBBR which is on a second line coming off the air pump.
At Eleven PM I pulled the six way valve off the PEX fitting and brought the affair to my garage workshop to see if I had another decent idea for fixing the stoppage.
As you are no doubt aware for every success there are untold failures. I didn't need anymore failures today. My plan was fairly simple: I needed to remove the hose barb from the six way brass air valve replacing it with a Sharkbite fitting. The criterion was it needed do be done now as the air was off to all our systems. I thought about using JB weld, but it would not dry in time.
Okay maybe I could drill out the valve to fit one end of the Sharkbite fitting into the valve body by brazing the joint. I hadn't brazed in a long time and was rusty, but I did feel lucky after the success of the filter and pump project so I leaped.
Now I remember why I did not do a lot of brazing on brass. The brass fittings melt very easily loosing shape. I did it as quick as possible and got a solid connection. I used Marine glue to seal it the best I could. Stuck it back in place by drop light in the greenhouse. Holy cow! I had full air to all systems for the first time since I've been trying to figure out why the SLO airlift system wasn't working properly. Dang! How cool is that? At least two birds with one stone on this day. Midnight, I had a large cup of sherbet and ice cream and calmed down for the night. Yummy. Great day all in all.
Brian Rodgers

More progress on the portable and filtered HDPE fish tank installation.
Please bear with me while I learn how to talk again after getting dentures. Sorry.


Here are a few shots of the fit without me blithering.

The black bulkhead connector near the top center of the tank is what I am using for a support structure for the DIY pump and filter. Air line tubes can now travel down the center of the bulkhead to power the submersible bilge pump.

My Buddy, always owns a car. For a country dog he loves riding or sleeping in the Jeep or the Jetta
This project still amazes me even after being in the emergency room because of one little mistake.
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And finally a look at the late night repair of the aquaponics air line system

It appears to be holding, yes there is a bit of loose air coming out of the 6 spigot valve, which isn't surprising considering I had to get the whole valve nearly red hot to get even this much metal to flow.
Hehe turns out those cheap looking valves don't have any plastic in them