Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello I'm located in Perth, Western Australia. I have already converted my swimming pool into a pond. It has been without chemicals for years now and already has some small fish in it.

I want to further the system to be an aquaponics/aquaculture hybrid and am wondering what sort of plants are good to put in the pond? (Currently there are no plants at all.)

Any recommendations on what to use and where to get them from?

What do you want to achieve?
Food? Ornamentation?
Do you have conservative or exotic tastes?
Do you have experience with plants?

There are so many possibilities, you will have to narrow it down a bit to have a reasonable starting point.

The simplest thing to do is to grow water plants. Some are edible and many look great. If you want to get away from the simplest thing, then anything goes (to the limits of your climate, and even then, you can use greenhouses)

Thanks furnaceboy!

I'm looking for a way to bring balance to my future system. Maybe aquatic plants will help?

I have been reading about cycling the water from the pond through the grow beds so that all the water from the pond passes through the grow beds over a certain period of time. (Not too fast nor too slow.) So my problem is I have 80,000 litres of water that needs to be cycled at just the right rate in a grow bed of a certain volume. (Volume still to be determined.)

I might not have that many fish to start with but then how are my grow beds going to get the nutrients if it's diluted in 80,000 litres?

On the flip side, when I do have more fish since I have plenty of water for them; I won't have enough grow bed volume to cope.

So I'm trying to figure out how to do this

I'm thinking that if I have some aquatic plants then they might help to bring balance to the system if I choose the right kind.

I have the original pool pump that has been detached from the original pool filter system. The pump is quite strong so I'm thinking of splitting the water so some goes to the grow bed/beds and some runs directly back into the pond as a fountain to help create movement and oxygenate the water.

The bed/beds will be flood and drain. There will be some small floating beds in the pond.

The pump might be expenisve to run all day long though. We do have offpeak at night but is it okay to not run a pump during the day time? Or maybe I could run a smaller pump in the day. Or get a medium sized pump to run all day.

These are just ideas and thoughts floating around in my head at the moment. Sorry if it's random, I just needed to get it all out there.

Hi Mac Welcome. Use the search feature and put in swimming pool and you should get some results as there are several swim pools being used for AP on here. Same rules apply to a pool system. The volume of the Grow beds controls the number of fish it can support in balance. Also find the IBC Aquaponic guide and download it and read that about the rules of thumb for sizing your stuff. There is even one I read that still uses his pond for swimming with the fish.

The sky is the limit on your imagination for grow beds and planting stuff. you can do external grow beds and streams to connect multiples and even water falls if that interests you.

As you are extremely unlikely to ever have enough growbeds to provide all the necessary biological activity once you have a good number of decent sized fish due to the size of your pool, I would be tempted to still use a filter as the main biofilter, and the growbeds as incidental biofilters. Then you don't have to stress about pool volume to growbed ratio, feeding rates, etc. It is not uncommon for people to switch the sand based media to plastic media to reduce back pressure, and not having to backflush so often to keep it clean. That being said, sand provides an awful lot of surface area for bacteria to live in.

You could just run the water outlet from your pump (after the filter), and then go into your growbeds.

Regarding the pump you have. I assume that it is a two speed pump. What is the power usage rated at? Lots of pool pumps are pretty brutally inefficient, even the so-called energy saver ones. I guess they figure if a person can afford a pool, they can afford to pay through the nose for power. I use a variable speed 1hp pump with 50mm inlet and outlet that when dialled down to turn over my 18000 litre pond in one hour, uses only 126 watts. This is much better than any pool pump I have found. It is more expensive up front, but cheaper after that.

Ditto... to all of the above...

Thanks everyone! Very helpful advise.