Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thorn,
Depending on your tank depth you should be ok as float valves only add an inch of water or less. But I have to agree with TCL on chloramine and cycling first.

I also agree with TCL on water loss. The amt of water you lose is also going to depend on amt of growbed as those are going to lose a lot of moisture from plant leaves. If you have a 1000 liter fish tank with a kilo of fish and a square meter of growbed you will lose far less moisture than if you have 50kg of fish and 6000 liters of growbed.

Not sure how much water I used but it was much more than I expected maybe up to 100L per day in the heatwave, I have just installed a 2500L poly tank for collecting rainwater to top up the system as the missus was not happy at me stealing her water

I agree with TCLynx - a top up tank is the way to go- gives time for any nasties to air out of the water.
But that is not the reason I use a top up tank. I have a couple of times turned on the top up water and forgotten to turn it off until much too much water has gone into the FT.
Wrecks the balance of GB fillings etc and a need to readjust the float switch in the FT- a real pain.
I now use a 200l blue barrel so the most I can over fill by is 200 litres and I am probably putting in 50 to 100 l anyway so the overfill is likely to be just 100 l or so. I have also put a float switch on the blue barrel as I have also forgotten to turn that one off when refilling it. (Seniors moments- happening too often)
As an added benefit I can also use the blue barrel to accurately measure how much top up water I add.
Over 12 months my added water - for a 4000litre fish tank and 3x 1200l GBs was 9000 litres

9000L over 12 months... about 750L/month... over 7600L total tank volume...

10%.... seems to be about the average...

Thats more like it rupe, if you read the posts earlier people were talking abut per day not per month. So 10% per month is much less than 1% per day that I top up. in fact its about a third as much your post earlier reads as though you put 10% in per day. Thats why i asked where the leak was.

Should have been more specific...

Posts above (other than C1) were mentioning xx/month... just assumed...

should have been at a time
loosely a week, sorry Rupe if that put you off.

Nah C1... ignored your figures anyway... as they worked out about 40%/month...

And MY actual figures are higher than most peoples... because my growbeds are pretty much full sun nearly all day... and exposed to a constant wind factor...

I'm also using a trickle tower for cooling, so there's an evaporative loss from that as well...

could you tell us more about the trickle cooling, how you set it up and how well its working?