Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi everyone, I've been reading here for ages but haven't really posted much, despite trying to soak up all of your collective wisdom. My first system is now cycled and growing things so I thought it was time to share my experiences and learnings and post some pictures!

I had originally planned to start with an IBC system after reading the IBC of Aquaponics, however on reflection I thought it best to start with something smaller, and in an area easier hidden from the wife in case it didn't go to plan or became a real mess! After rebuilding a fence with my neighbour, a small area with good afternoon sun measuring 1.2m x 5m became available and with little else to do in the limited space, a barrel setup seemed ideal.

I decided on a CHIFT PIST system because I wanted to make good use of the length of the space, using half cut barrels for grow beds. I also wanted to bury the sump to keep water temperatures under control in the baking Perth summer. Will see if it is any good at stabilising winter temps in a few months!

I tried to prepare a lot by reading as much as I could, trying to balance my over-enthusiasm to get started with some basic knowledge based on others experiences. There is no substitute for getting your hands dirty and learning for yourself, however.

I will now try to post some pictures and describe my experiences along the way. Thanks for listening!

Hey Solopaulo, good to see another victi... I mean enthusiast! Welcome to BYAP and the wonderful world of addicti... I mean hobbies with fish n stuff.

Looking forward to seeing what you have running. See you around the forums.

Good to see you have made a start mate

Welcome aboard, Solopaulo! A surprising amount of productivity can be achieved with an area of just 6 sqm, especially if you are going underground as well. I think choosing drums/barrels as your basic building block is quite logical.
I wish you all the best and look forward to following the progress of your system.

The sump is sunk into the ground, about 80%. That's as far as I had the energy to dig down, as I was tired, there wasn't much more room to excavate the sand to, and I was worried about the hardie fence falling in on me! In retrospect it was beneficial to have it no deeper, because it means I could still fit an overflow for the sump if I wanted.

The fish tank is sitting on 4 treated pine boards, this is an unorthodox way to remove the kinks from Big B store's timber, but it works. The boards sit atop a bed of sand surrounded by bricks.

FT has a light in it which I use to have a look at the fishies sometimes. This picture was very early on when I was just plugging things together and learning about flow. I can tell you I underestimated the effect of head on the pump. I elected for a low voltage pump at 2400L p/h, although the actual flow rate is much lower depending on the level in the sump.

At the moment I have 8 goldfish in the tank. I am a little sad and somewhat embarrassed to say I lost 2 goldfish early on; the first one escaped through my SLO which had holes that were too big at the bottom, and it wasn't seated correctly on the bottom of the FT. I believe the second one died during cycling, floated to the top, and ended up being sucked in the top of the SLO which shouldn't have been possible but the tank was probably flooding. all of these defects are now resolved and the system cycled, it is a much safer and more pleasant place for the fish to be.

I guess this is a big lesson I learned that I wish I understood better at the start - the nitrogen cycle and the new system effect with regards to ammonia. The information is out there but sometimes it doesn't sink in right and you make mistakes. if you are reading this and you are about to start your first system - it's probably better to cycle without fish.

I love timber and woodwork so I was happy to make a stand for my 2 half barrel grow beds. I found a great discount / seconds hardware store not too far from my house and managed to pick up 5 lengths of 120x35x2100mm structural timber for $40. Seemed a good deal to me. Filled in all the holes and knots and finished it off with some water based marine varnish, will be interesting to see how it weathers the winter.

It's not pretty but it's more than up to the job. I reckon I could fill these half with gravel and half with hydroton and it would take the weight. during cycling / connection washing, I filled one GB full of water and it hardly bowed at all. I'm sure it would be a different story under continuous load, however. In the end I decided to fill both growbeds exclusively with hydroton. I love the way it feels and looks, although it'll be interesting to see what is required (if anything) to support the heavier top growing plants.

for the first GB, I mixed some of BYAP's chinese hydroton ~$26 per bag for 50L, with the Canna pebbles at ~$46 per bag for around 45L. The difference is quite remarkable, you really do get what you pay for and the Canna pebbles are a really high quality product in my opinion. The chinese hydroton break easily, float more than the Canna and in my experience had a lot more junk in the bag.

I am not disappointed by any of that however, the staff at BYAP told me all of this before I bought it, and even showed me some in their growbeds. I find this stuff is actually good as a top up or mix with Canna pebbles, but I'd never run a full growbed full of it. I've had some high PH issues and I did wonder that if the Chinese pebbles were so brittle, what confidence did i have about their inertness, hmm? More on PH later. It also didn't help that i failed to wash these properly, a lesson I learned from, and did a much better job of with my second growbed. There was about a 3 week gap between setting up the first growbed and hooking up the second growbed.

I have to admit, I struggled a lot trying to work out how to arrange the drainage in these half cut blue barrels. The combination of small dimensions, curvature in one dimension and a distinct lack of knowledge of PVC plumbing parts, meant that I took a quite hack and slash approach to draining the barrels. The end result is something that works (mostly), but took a lot of effort and is probably going to require redoing in a couple of years, although maintenance so far is ok.

I had intended to run syphons in these growbeds but most of my attempts failed, I think because I probably just wasn't doing it right, but also because there was not enough distance between the components. My symptom was that the syphon would start, but never break. Damn it was pretty noisy too.

My media guard is some 90mm PVC or possibly the DWV stuff. it's 90mm anyway. I thought about using something bigger but it gets damn expensive and the curvature of the grow bed makes it difficult. As it is, I had to chuck in a bunch of white river pebbles that i had to keep the hydroton out of the bottom of the guard where the curvature is lowest. this works, and allows me to turn the media guard which i read will be important if my tomato plants ever get as crazy as I am hoping for.

For a standpipe i just put a 25mm coupler on the end of a section of 25mm pipe with some holes drilled, just above where the coupler ends. Initially the system was continuous flow whilst cycling, but have now changed to timer based flood and drain, which i think is working really well. between 10am and 5pm the pump is 45mins on, 15 off, and all other times it is 15mins on and 15mins off.

I have one of those AC/DC air pumps kicking out about 5L a minute with two air stones that run constantly in the FT. I don't really know much about how much DO is appropriate but given some people only have the water return splash as their DO input, it's probably ok?

and further to the last post, some more things.

i used some selleys 401 or something which is supposed to be food safe and has good movement. however, the application i made in the picture above was not enough and it separated from the HDPE, which many people said it would. For my second attempt I used a bit more silicon on all surfaces with a small buffer in between to allow for more movement, and in addition i used a slither of 40mm pipe as a kind of "olive" on the under side of the coupling with some more silicon, which seems to keep it flexible yet perfectly sealed. this is not the way to drain these grow beds, but it has worked for me - for now.

Also, during an early visit to BYAP, they suggested not bothering with home made syphons and instead using timers for flood and drain. in retrospect i wish i'd followed their advice earlier, and saved the syphon novelty interest for some other project!

I bought some shade sail to attempt to reduce the intensity of the heat from the peak summer sun. it sort of works, but when it's 41C and the sun is high in the sky... well no-one is having a good time, whether it's people or plants. It does feel nice in there though and I do believe it makes some difference.

Early on in my experiments I noticed that the fish tank surface was reaching around 45C during the peak sun periods, with the water temperature around 35C, even with the sump cycling - although it too was exposed from the top to full sun.

I decided to buy a roll of sark which I happened to find half price at Big B's for $38 or something, which made it more palatable. still got loads left. I decided to cover the whole of the sump and FT area and must say this has made a huge difference. In addition I surrounded the FT with a couple of layers of earthwool and then the sark too, which probably helps also. I don't think the earthwool is really tight enough and thick enough to provide much insulation, but it does make the barrel more comfortable to lean against when i'm gazing at the fishies.

water temps now are generally around 26-29C during the peak sun periods, which i feel much better about. much less swing in temperatures. Having a laser temperature gun really makes it more fun!

the growbed stand in place, with the stud / rafter, fairy lights and fishing net to the right. all important things

In the first grow bed i was too impatient and decided not too wash the media properly, thinking that they weren't that mucky. this was a big mistake and now there is a bunch of silty fine dusty crap in my system that wasn't caught by the skimmer sock sitting over the sump return pipe. it did clear quite quickly (about 3 days, an age in aquaponics years), and the fish have done a good job of organising the dusty bits into neat little sections. i regret it though.

I put in some old but very hardy basil plants from the garden into the growbed just so there was something in there to soak up anything needing soaked up. i've been surprised how well these plants fared, even during cycling. these basil plants always do well if watered enough so it's probably not attributable to what has probably been at times a toxic environment to be in. they succeeded despite me, rather than because of me!

I also happened to find a carrot of about 14mm in length in the garden which i thought i would chuck in. as others have said, it seemed to be all roots and shoots and no carrot, but i've sinced raised it right up in the growbed and with the F&D of the last week or so, the carrot itself is growing.

I obviously have some kind of problem with my SLO as well. without some kind of top overflow, my FT will overflow. it's perhaps because the SLO uses 25mm instead of something larger. After much tinkering i have found an acceptable work around which is to have a short top piece with holes drilled in it. water flows through the SLO at a rate of around 70% bottom and 30% top I estimate, based on experiments with completely capping the top. I believe this might be affecting how well the water mixes in the FT, more on that later.

I quite often see some of these guys hanging out on the basil leaves. does anyone know what they are? they kind of look like baby crickets or grasshoppers and they move like them too.

you can see the leaves of the basil starting to yellow. I added a 5ml spoonful of chelated iron to the sump about a week ago. i waited around 4 days to see if things picked up, which they sort of seemed to but wasn't sure if i just imagined it. i added another 5ml spoonful and decided to leave it at that. hopefully it wasn't too much and i decided probably best to investigate pH issues before adding any more stuff to the water

in this picture you can see my sump tank. on left, the pump output exits the tank. there's a ball valve for a quick return that stops the flow feeding to the FT. I find this really useful when I want to stop flow to the FT but don't want to turn the pump off. it has the side effect of creating a suction effect on the FT feed, so I had to fit a syphon breaker to let air in and stop water (and fishy!) drawback.

on the right, the growbed drainage returns to the sump. you can just see the skimmer sock tied in a knot around the pipe as it enters the sump.

Here I have another ball valve to allow disposal of water from the growbeds.

in my second growbed it was actually really easy to wash the pebbles. i just ran the hose into the growbed and let it run out the bottom - the bed was flooded meaning i could swoosh the pebbles around to get lots of friction and knock the dust off them. i reckon it only took about 10 to 15 minutes, and once reconnected to the system the FT water didn't even go cloudy.