Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey all my name is John and I'm from The Netherlands, welcome to my system thread, as a quick intro, here's a blatant copy-paste from my new member introductions:

My first system is a small ~80L indoor system, which is about 2 years old now. Everything but the growbed is hidden from sight in a closet and is tucked away in a corner of our living room. After tinkering with it for about a year I decided to scale things up and built an outdoor system in a greenhouse. This system is about 1800L and consists of an IBC FT and ST, with three bathtubs for growbeds, for a nice 1:1 ratio on FT:Wet media. Unfortunately I didnt finish it before summer came along, so it hasn't grown tons for us over the past few months. It's currently only lightly stocked with 12 goldfish ranging in size (12-25cm), but I'd like to try some edible fish next year, such as the Jade Perch, which should technically be available here.

I'm currently still debating putting up lighting and, ofcourse, ways to heat my greenhouse in a way that's not cost-prohibitive.

Indoor system

FT: 50L
ST: 30L
GB: 70L

Having read through a ton of threads on the forum, I tried my hand at a system that was easy to manage, yet looked somewhat presentable, as it was going to sit in the living room. The system is housed in a cabinet, so I had to make it fit somehow. Instead of the regular FT -> RFF -> GB -> ST I went for a FT -> RFF -> ST -> GB to make the setup work. I figured a filter wouldn't hurt as I had no idea how much waste goldfish produce and didn't want to run it all through the pump with a FT -> GB -> ST setup. It does a fairly good job to keep the ST clean, although I have to clean it 2-3 times a year. The filter gets cleaned every few months and feeds a few potted pepper plants. As a bonus, it has a few worms living in it full time
Both the light and the pump are run on mechanical timers, running the system on constant flood/flow with a simple standpipe in the growbed, no siphon. A few 1 hour breaks are set throughout the day for feeding.

The growbed is ontop of the cabinet, with a 50W LED COB hanging from a painted PVC frame. Here some pics...

Outdoor system

FT: 900L
ST: 900L
GB: 950L

With this system I opted for the traditional FT -> GB -> ST setup. With the measurements leaving some room between GB and FT, I figured I could always add a filter if necessary. With my eye set on a particular greenhouse, I was again faced with the limitations of available space. IBCs for growbeds would not allow me to put enough growing space up, so I went for bathtubs instead. Prefab bins of the right size were just outragiously expensive so not really an option. The tubs were the right fit, having room for three beds with the FT also inside. Since I like to eyeball things instead of worrying too much, I kinda oversized my FT outflow piping because I based it all on my SLO size, but it works for now.
The system runs on timed flood, with standpipes 5cm below the hydroton surface and weeping holes in the bottom, which allows the beds to fill up in 12 minutes, overflow for 3 minutes and drain in about 40 minutes.

Unfortunately the world of aquaponics is still very small in these parts of the world, so I've had a lot of trouble sourcing some of the materials used like the diameter of pipe I (thought I) needed and the taps that would fit them (these were also expensive btw). Decent, balanced fishfood without fishmeal or -oil and organic seaweed extract were the most difficult, but also Potassium Bicarbonate, Calcium Carbonate and DTPA iron chelate were hard to find. So on top of starting my growing late because of construction difficulties, I didn't get to experiment with any of the additives until summer was over. Still, there was growth, so I'm not too worried.

Thanks for watching, feel free to leave any questions

Nice set up.......

Wow, good work!! any fish in there yet? I will be very interested in the annual temperature pattern you get in there with that nice deeply sunken sump!

Also, in the first indoor set up... what kind of bulb is that? and is it supplementing light from the window, or powering the plants all by itself?

Nice job dude!

nicely done, I'm going to tag along, I think your weather may be similar to mine based on latitudes...

Lovely set up.
I have buried a sump tank before too.
Worthwhile me thinks.

-K98

Yeah 12 goldfish (12-25cm) have been in there since July I think. Here's some temperature data off the top of my head:

Air min: 6℃ (only recently ofcourse, as winter is setting in at the moment)
Air max: 45℃ (absolute max, because the door was left closed on the hottest day, windows are automatic)

Water min: 10℃
Water max: 30℃ (also on the hottest day, at that point the FT was only covered with shade cloth. With the alu bubblewrap it hasn't gone over 24℃ on similarly hot days. Luckily there were no fish in there at that point)

So far I'm just keeping track of temps with a cheap indoor/outdoor station, but in the future I'd like to automate a bunch of stuff.



It's a Cree CXB3590 CD 4000K 80CRI 36V, which are very efficient at 1.4A. As the sun angles away from the setup during the day, only the plant(s) in the corner near the window get any (indirect) sunlight, so I run the light for 16h a day all year round. For the amount of grow space (~0.5 square meter) it's enough, though not by much.

Just FYI, I'm very happy with the light as it wasn't very expensive (~120EUR all-in), performs very well (~12.000 lumens with decent canopy penetration) and the heatsink doesn't get warmer than say 35-40℃. I've tried some cheap Chinese "growlights" aswell, with only red/blue LED's, but you can definately tell that the plants prefer cool white. I'd advise anyone to only go for top bin Cree COBs, worth the money!

Fantastic setups. I'll follow along as well.
Brian

Time for a little update!

Indoor system
Over the past weeks I've been experimenting with supplemental plant feeds like seaweed extract trying to compensate for some deficiency, which is causing my pepper plants to keep aborting flowers. After some trial and error, it turned out to be a phosphate issue which I'll try to correct soon.
The pepper plants have really exploded over the past winter, as you can see in the (crappy) pic below. There's also some ginger, borage, spring onion and parsley in there.


Outdoor system
With our cold and dark winter, things have been at a slow pace in the outdoor system. With the temps dropping I figured I'd try to add some extra, though temporary insulation to the greenhouse in the form of bubble wrap. We cut pieces to fit the separate polycarb panels and just used a film of water to stick them in place. So far, with all the humidity inside, they've kept up quite well and it's made a nice difference during the colder nights. I had to put up an electric heater over the past week though, to keep the inside temp above freezing, but without the extra insulation that would've futile.

The previous 2000L/h pump has been replaced by an adjustable 2000-10.000L/h pump. The new pump is much more energy efficient and also enables me to have some expansions online during the summer. Over the past weekends I've knocked up a DWC/SWC pipe (125mm) along one side of the walkway for some of the higher turnover crops like lettuce and pakchoi. It still needs some cladding to keep it from heating up too much. At this point I'm still debating putting up a similar setup outside, hanging off the fence.





Right now there's some beans, peas, carrots and a fig tree.

Covered the new expansion in the same aluminium bubble wrap that's on the FT to keep it cool during the summer. Each hole has its own cover, which can be rotated to keep the light out when the hole is not used.
Since the weather has turned unseasonally warm already, I figured I might aswell put some plants in while I'm at it! There's some lettuce, okra and paksoi that were started indoors in peat pellets.

Please remove the fig cuttings. They will take over the bed and choke everything.

Thats a big plus one on that.