Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have been poking around on your forums for several weeks and figured it was time to register.

My dad and I are in the process of starting up an aquaponic system to produce food here at home and possibly break into small scale commercial food production. I maintained my own homemade hydroponics system out here for around 6 years and had great results from that. It was a six trough system with the troughs being 16ft long and 8in wide. The reservoir was a 250gal polyethylene tank buried 3/4 in the ground. Our single pump was a ViaAqua that was rated at 1400gph. It was a closed system which means no nutrients were ever dumped.

Dad has decided though that aquaponics is something he wants to try and I'm happy to help him out. I also think it would be an interesting experience that could yield fine rewards.

We found this site by watching the youtube flick on how to convert an IBC into an aquaponics system, which I for one, thought was a very resourceful thing to do. I like that. I also like the well illustrated video. Anyone could understand how to go about that after watching the video.

Anyway, it's nice to meet you and I hope all is well with your systems:)

Welcome ckirkley,
You might want to download the IBC of aquaponics as it has lots of great pictures of IBC systems as well as some good reference materials.
http://backyardaquaponics.com/component/content/article/1/180-the-ibc-of-aquaponics.html

Good luck with your project.

Thank you, TCLynx but I downloaded that before I found the forum.

That'll come in handy for reference pretty soon. We have 5 IBC's that we bought a while back for that purpose.

hey im in ga to were are you going to get you fish ??? and what type

Hey locoyoel,

We're in dodge county and have heard of two fishery/hatcheries within 60 miles of us. I don't have their names on hand at the moment. We're learning heavily towards catfish (brown bullnose or channel) because we will only mildly manage the climate in the greenhouse. Some of the other choices we've seen don't really like cold water and in the winter, that's what we're going to have most likely. We would consider insulating tanks and an efficient water heater but that and fans in the summer are about all the climate control we're going to do.

It'll be spring before we can get anything major going. We removed our old 26'x85' greenhouse and are building a new one in it's place out of PT lumber and that's the current project. Once we get that done and start building the system, we'll nail down our fish sources.

You got info on sources in Georgia?

Nice to meet you Georgian.

Hey guys, where abouts are the you located?

I am also from Georgia, Cherokee county and looking to build a small Aquaponics system. I am worried about the type of fish because of the weather here as well. I would love to use something like Tilapia but if they can not survive there is obviously no reason too. Does anyone have a system I can drop by and look at one afternoon?

Bryan.

If your system is big enough (300 gallon fish tank) Channel Catfish are not a bad fish and in my opinion are better than tilapia. Even here in central Florida my channel catfish grew much bigger much faster than tilapia since I wasn't gonna heat the water. And if you are running a bit small on fish tank to do channel catfish, Bluegill are a good eating fish.

Looks like a 2 hr drive from where you live to my place. If you wanted to see my small system, it would have to be on the weekend, so PM me for directions, correspondance, phone number, etc...

I'll agree with TCL on the Cats. Have no intention of getting tilapia. I'll be getting Catfish in the spring if things work out for me. Might split an order if you are interested.