Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi,
My name’s Stephanie and I’ve been kind of lurking and reading and rereading the free volume of the magazine for the last 6 months or so. My fiancé and I are in the process of buying a house with a nice big backyard so I can have my own aquaponic garden.

So far I’ve immensely enjoyed reading about everyone’s projects that they have built or in the process of building.

My fiancé is a bit more concerned about aesthetics than I am and he wants the fish to be kept in an ornamental pond with a waterfall in it rather than a large tub that’s above ground. I’ve been looking through the members systems and haven’t seen many with ponds. Can anyone point me to a thread or two that’s similar? Are there any advantages over digging a pond versus just using a large container?

Thanks,
Stephanie

Welcome Stephanie allways good to have another contributor! Ive been thinking along those lines for siteing a fish tank cant see a problem with digging a hole and dropping the tank in. Make it easy to gravity drain the grow beds back into temp control is the only thing that concerned me old mother earth she is a good insulator but not easy to control how hot or cold . If you used the right combo of fish and location i guess you could bury pipes and all sorts of things. When other half becomes totally addicted to AP I'me sure his asathetic concerns will diminish a tad.

Hi Stephanie, check out outback ozzie's , system for a start, I like it, cause it didn't really cost a great deal, and works really well

Hi Stephanie and welcome to the forum - looking forward to seeing pics as your system grows

A hint:
If you click on "User Control Panel" (top right of page)
then select "Profile" (left hand side under Options)

you can then change your gender - that's if you want to

Welcome Steph,
IMHO I like the idea of the fish tank in the ground for several reasons. Mainly because of aesthetics but also to keep your grow beds from being so high and using a ladder to harvest such things as indeterminate tomatoes, okra, corn and other veggies that are tall or climbing. That way the grow bed is on the ground and can be covered up, dressed up and beautified to suit you/your partner's desires.

Thanks for the warm welcome and all the suggestions so far!

Dig a hole and line it with pond liner

A very pleasing design could be quite easily be made.

Hi Stephanie
I am at 3500 ft elevation in northern Arizona. I use an above ground pond to raise cat fish and water raised bed dirt garden from it. It gives about as good a yield as fertilizer. I do feed a small AP grow bed with the pond to grow comfrey as fodder for chickens and rabbits. One pump feeds the grow bed or diverts to the garden and supplies a fountain. A bug lite over the pond feeds the fish and keeps pest out of plants and house.

My main tank on my current big system is an in ground lined tank. I can share many pros and cons to doing it this way. My first experience with anything like this was re-doing an ornamental pond for my mom and cousin.
First rule, use high quality pond liner!!!!!!

Ok, many things will affect your system design and choices.
What is your ground like and do you have any slope to the yard? Sand is easy to dig in but cal also tend to collapse in if you don't make the sides slope enough. Clay is hard to dig but can make shaping easier. A slope to the yard can allow you the height and fall needed for siphon drains without having to build stands for stuff.

Type of fish, and climate and greenhouse etc. The by far best choice is to choose a type of fish that can grow in your climate without too much extra attention. Tilapia outdoors in a cool climate cost a bundle in heating. Your ground temperatures are as important as the air temps, even more so if you sink tanks or put beds right on the ground. If your ground temps stay withing the appropriate temp range for your chosen fish, then all is good, great in fact since the ground will help moderate your system temps. If your ground temps go colder than the range for your fish, you might be better off insulating the tank from the ground. Since you are talking about an ornamental pond type tank, you had better choose fish that like your ground temps.

Benefits I see to making the tank ornamental.
1-looks cool
2-a waterfall is great aeration
3-probably easier to convert to a simple ornamental pond if you sell the place.

Challenges to think about if trying to go ornamental.
1-Hard to cover an ornamental pond (reasons for covering tanks. Keep children from getting in, keep fish from jumping out, keep debris from falling in, keep wildlife from eating your fish and shading out light to avoid the pea soup stage during start up.)
2-Ornamental ponds usually have lots of rocks and plants around them and are not a standard shape, this could make harvesting your fish tricky while they try to hide from you.
3-working out the plumbing and such so the system is efficient yet looks ornamental.
4-keeping an ornamental pond functioning well with an aquaponics system high stocking density and solids removal to keep everything healthy while still looking good will be a lot of added things to deal with in the Aquaponics balancing act.

Some important things to keep in mind when placing anything in the ground.
1-make sure the top edge comes up above the ground enough to ensure that water running over ground won't get in the system. A heavy rain even with water coming off the roof of a house near by can really mess with drainage if not carefully thought out.
2-If the tank/pond were in ground and not full of water, what happens during a really heavy rain if water gets under that tank/pond? This may not be as important an issue in your climate but should be taken into account anyway. Many people have had sump tanks forcefully eject themselves from the ground often breaking plumbing lines in the process. With liner the problem isn't that the pond will pop out of the ground but very wet soil behind liner can slump if the slope of the sides and the weight of the water can't hold it back.

If you do a simple system with tank/pond in ground and grow beds above ground doing flood and drain with no sump tank, the level in the pond will fluctuate. If stocking density isn't too high, you don't need as much grow beds so this fluctuation might not be such a big deal but if you want lots of fish and lots of plants, you will have to figure out how to buffer this fluctuation (usually done with a sump of some sort but that gets tricky when the fish tank is already below ground level.) For an ornamental system, perhaps this could be dealt with by making a sort of bog plant gravel area around the pond so as the surface level rises in the pond, the volume increases through this "bog" area and provides you with more biofilter area as well as being ornamental and perhaps growing other plants.

Now draining, pumping and getting solids out of an in ground pond can be trickier than a nice above ground tank that venturi drains directly into some grow beds. This is the one thing I'm still trying to sort out for future systems for myself. The fact that I need a pump that has to suck water up from below and the solids go through the pump first means that I need extra parts (priming pot/trap and swing check valve) and causes extra maintinance. I need to clean the pump trap every few days or the flow slows way down. The fish poop/bio slime doesn't seem to bother the pump too much but the snails tend to block the trap screen enough that the poop/slime does start to build up too. If I had a hill, I would dig the pond in somewhere high enough up that I could venturi drain out of the pond through a gravel bed by gravity before I put a pump in line. Or perhaps on the future plans, I would only dig the tank half way into the ground and thereby have enough height to venturi drain out of it into a bed.

I keep mentioning venturi drains. Things to note here a venturi drain is a drain that sucks water/solids out of the bottom of a tank without risk of the water draining down below a certain point or siphoning down below that point. This protects the fish from being left high and dry if a pump manages to take all the water out of the tank while some sort of malfunction stops the water from draining back into the tank. CHIFT PIST systems(constant height in fish tank pump in sump tank systems) often use venturi drains to get solids out of the bottoms of their tanks and into the grow beds. They do require some other location for the pump as in a sump tank.

Good luck with your plans!!!!!!

Thanks for all the info TCLynx
I spent a couple of weeks slowly reading through your systems thread and what you've done is simply amazing.

I failed to get the house i wanted to buy, so i'm stuck in my apartment a bit longer. So i'm now thinking of doing a small system on my apartment balcony.

I've found a 30 gallon aquarium on craig's list this afternoon that i'm going to pick it up tonight and when i talked to the lady on the phone she mentioned that if i were to use gold fish in a tank that size i'd only be able to put three in there. Is that right for a tank that size? I've looked through some of the other systems on here that use aquariums and they seem to be using more than 1 fish per ten gallons. Or am i just mis estimating size, it's kind of hard to guess at the volume of some pictures.

Where do you find the time to compose such informative posts TCL

The usuall ratio for new systems is up to 3kg of fish per 100 litres of water - provided you have the growbed capacity. This equals around 6 plate sized fish - a lot more than 3 goldfish Probably 3 goldfish with one water change a year.

That comment about 3 fish in that size aquarium is the kind of thing you might see in normal aquarium culture. The big difference between normal aquarium culture and Aquaponic culture is that AP will help remove Nitrates once the plants are growing while in Aquarium you need to do water changes to keep the nitrates down. Aquarium filters also usually don't convert as much ammonia and nitrite to nitrate as a grow bed will. I have 3 little (like 2 inch long) tilapia in my ten gallon aquarium. It is hooked to 5, 5 gallon buckets as grow beds and there is a sump tank that will hold much more than 25 gallons thought. I could put quite a few more small fishes in that aquarium and have no problems. I would not be able to grow out the fish very large in such a small aquarium though. I currently have 5 larger fish 6"-8" in a (so called 50 gallon aquarium which probably only has 40 gallons in it) larger aquarium. It is hooked to my main system now. The 5, 5 gallon buckets of gravel were kinda hard pressed to keep up with 3 large Tilapia.

So, you can put as many fish in as your gravel volume will filter for keeping in mind that you still need enough aeration in the tank and you want to be humane to the fish. (a 10" fish in a 12" wide tank is gonna have trouble turning around and that would be kinda uncomfortable living conditions.)

How many fish you can put in that tank will be bassed on how much gravel or other media you have in your grow beds, (most of our numbers work best with flood and drain set ups), what kind of fish and how big they get. Your system design will also affect how many fish you can keep in a tank. If you do flood and drain but have no sump, your tank levels will fluctuate and you will have to think about how the fish will do when they are in shallower water. If you have a sump, then things get easier.

Good luck!