Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello and welcome,

I felt a need to share with the group what they have inspired. I am brand new member, yet i have been reading this forum for sometime now. My mission here is to chronicle my adventures in aquaponic gardening, but with a twist. I will be buying nothing with the intention of using it in my system. Everything, with the exception of some unavoidables (<<oh yes i did just coin a new word)like electricity, will either be found, given(used only) or recycled. I have already cheated however, i purchased 4 bags of pea gravel. I was going to collect the grow media from a creek up the road but the gravel was full of glass, nails, and other things, and there was to much size variation to really make it worth the time, but it could be done.

I am currently heading towards my second month of operation, so a little catch up is in order.

I stared with an old plastic planter it holds around 20+ gallons.(whats that like 60 liters?) I also had a fountian pump, its currently pumping some where between 5 and 10 gallons per minute. My grow beds are recycled motor mixing trays. At this time i only had 1, each tray holds 2 bags of pea gravel, with media i would guess they hold 2.5 gallons of water. My tubing is 3/4" garden hose which is to big for the pump outlet so i clamped it down with a very strong compression ring clamp. For my drain pipes i took some 1/2" pvc that was left broken and scattered in the yard when i moved in. My table is ply board from a dog house courtesy of the previous residents, and 6 truck tires i picked up from the shop (they gave me a coke for taking them) And that was it, my first test run had commenced.

LoF, sounds like fun, good luck and welcome to the forum

Any photo's. It makes the reading easier.

The next day i started thinking about fish. For aeration i sliced holes into some hose to act as a venturi. That worked very well, better than i had imagined, however i still wasn't happy with it, so i ended up putting some air line down the pipe to further increase the air flow. Big mistake number one. all the extra air in the hose was taking up space, You wouldn't think it but air can really slow down your water flow. I woke up the next morning to find my pump gurgling air and the ground soaked. After a few curse words i unplugged the pump. and started looking for an air pump, thankfully my sister had one she was willing to part with. So i refilled my tank and started the system up again, this time with an air pump. I left the venturi in the drain because it didn't seem to hurt the flow at all... be leave me i was watching.

I let that run for a few days with some good ole first morning urine for bacteria growth. Then i started thinking about flood and drain. I had remembered watching a youtube video where this guy had cup over his stand pipe so i started experimenting with different sized cups and different heights of the pipe which was less than successful. I ended up putting a section of hose on the outside of the drain which was about 2 feet long. I did this because some water was splashing out of the tank.(the water has a good 10 inch drop into the water) this is how i stumbled upon what i now know to be a loop siphon. At the time i didn't even have it looped, it was just attacked to the side of the grow bed with wire. i noticed that lots of air was being sucked into the hose and i wandered what would happen i lifted the end of the drain hose to the level i wanted the grow bed at. An interesting experiment to say the least. the water would equalize but the bed would flood. that was the point in which i realized what i was doing and completed the loop-less siphon.

My suggestion to any new person is to read BEFORE you start fiddling. It was allot of fun being a kid again though

Until this point i had only really read about how aquaponics work, the science behind it. after the loop-less thing i stared wandering why it worked. Or vise versa...

Yes, LoF, there is a balance between too much studying and jumping in too quickly. But, you'll learn lots and maybe discover something new too. Welcome aboard.

Here is another $$ that I would count unavoidable. Get yourself a Freshwater master test kit so you can test pH, hi range pH, Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate.
Here is a link where you can get them pretty cheap.
http://www.thatpetplace.com/pet/prod/199591/product.web
This will help you track how your cycling is going and help you catch some problems in the future before they kill all the fish.

As to the urine, that is a pretty small system so I doubt you will need to use so much normally. I have a system with over 50 gallons of gravel in it and less than 50 gallons of fish tank. It only needs about half a cup a day of urine to run fishless.

Good luck and looking forward to seeing your progress.