Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

For anyone wondering about plant growth rates in AP, here's an early clip from my DVD. It's just photos stuck together over 16 days of growth. And yes it's real, anyone with my book package has a CD-rom with the images on it and photo dates are contained in the metadata.

That is some very impressive growth you have had there!

Mine still looks nothing like it after 4 months (from setup). Things getting quicker as the system is now getting settled and the fish are getting bigger and eating more. Nothing short of inspiration though to continue as the system goes from strength to strength.

Out of curiosity, what were the specs of that system ie. fish, quantity of fish, age of system and FT size.

Well done!

This is amazing. Which season is it and what is the temperature during this period.

I'm convinced. Where do I sign?

That is a very convincing argument.

Is that with really high nitrate levels?

Certainly is impressive EB. Would also be interested in some stats on your system.

Have you thought about using something like this for your dvd?

http://www.nimisis.com/projects/flix.php

There may well be better options out there. Just an idea for you.

This was done back in 2004, quite a while back. I'm guessing on things, but I figure that it isn't summer, otherwise there would be mango's hanging from the tree in the background. At a guess I would say that the system would have been a couple of years old, but I have no idea how many fish were in the system at the time.

This was the first time I had ever tried to do a time lapse type thing and it was a bit of a joke... I would take the camera out each day and sit it on the same rung of the ladder, take the photo and hope for the best. I've done some more since then with a waterproof camera on a tripod, set in place and not moved.. Light is still an issue as some days are sunny and some are not, night works fairly well to solve this with a flash so that all pics are the same light, but still requires some playing...

Oh, system details. Fish tank is over 4000L, and growbed I think is about 250-300L. The bed is filled with cracked gravel and runs on continuous flow.

System is still going now, but only growing water cress, fish at the moment are 3-4 Silvers of 1.5-2kg and probably a dozen closer to .5kg..

Probably one of the oldest continuously running systems around as I would think its over 10 years old now.. I am going to have to replace the growbed though, the old one has had it but I've been trying to keep it going for as long as possible seeing it's one of my originals.

I'll post a few pics up of the system


The system started with a simple X irrigation grid but I found that didn't spread the water enough over the bed so included an extra little trickle pipe to spread the water more. This system was constant flow but not constant flood, so water went straight down and along the base of the bed.

I was using the pump to circulate the water in the fish tank as well as pump through the growbed.



I changed this around and added solenoids into it so that now and then I could pump in the circular motion rather than all the time. (you can almost see them here.)



All operated from the control box.



I planned to put a little PLC in there, had the program sorted do that it would pump to the bed most of the time, but now and then do a recirculation mode to get all solids to the middle of the tank. Gave up on this idea as the solenoids didn't do well with dirty water, plus solids build up didn't really become a problem anyway.