Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This is my first post been lurking in the background for some time now , and want to ask your advice before sticking my head out, i have a small system running in my backyard producing tomato's, celery,baby marrows and fish, i now have the opportunity to expand this to a commercial system but need some help.

The plan is to put up 3 tunnels/hothouses to do aquaponics as well as seedlings for the local town i do believe that if we are successful we will be able to supply them with veggie's too the problem is that i need help in designing the system to be built as we want to do some fish farming as well also as a food source for the locals we are looking at tillapia,catfish and koi for the fun. We have no power supply so we have to consider that everything we need will have to use solar or wind generated power as we want to be independent .

The farm is situated on these coordinates 29°45'53.34"S 17°39'15.99"E if you want to have a look at what the area looks like please guys i really need your input on this as you all are old hands and to make sure that i don't waste money and time.

If you look at the map you will see the river is dry but remember the water still flows underground and can be pumped

Waiting for ideas and inputs
Thank you

Man that's some rugged looking country. good luck with your project.

There are a few Seth Ifricans on here hopefully they might chime in with some local knowledge.

Don't forget the pic's of your progress

Hi Andre

Welcome to the forum. Hell there's nothing around you for kilometers

Regards

Willem

Hio all

The time have now come to put pen to paper and do the design of my system i'm going to build on the farm i have a couple of questions to ask i know it was covered somewhere on this forum but i thought that it could be nice to have all or most of the answers under my topic so i could get to your replies and suggestions without any searching

Q1 We are going to use 4 4500l fish tanks so do i connect them to each other so i can keep a constant water height in all the tank's?

Q2 I want to implement flood and drain media beds as well as deep water culture i was thinking of connecting them in series but the problem will be that their will be no water flowing into the dwc beds while my media beds fills up do you guys see this as a major problem ?

Q3 or Should i have a separate supply line to the DWC beds passing trough a swirlfilter to get rid of the solids before it reaches the DWC tank ?

My plan was to use the growbeds for what they were intended for to get rid of the solids but i need to know what the waterflow should be in the DWC beds to ensure oxygen supply to the plants there, the mediabeds will be 6m long by 1.2m wide i will be running 3 of them next to each other followed by 3 DWC beds of the same size , as we are going to use solar and wind generators to supply the power i can only use one pump to get the water from the sump back to the fishtanks .

Hi Andre,

I am Djimo from Mozambique currently studying in Florida.

I want to build a similar system in White River, SA for profit.

I think I have a few documents that you might find interesting. Provide me with your email and I would be glad to share them.

From what I know, DWC seems to be the most economically feasible. I would suggest that you ditch the grow beds altogether and use only DWC with steady/constant water flow after the BIO filter and solids removal (You should implement both for long term, hassle free system health). I don's see why you would want to use any grow media unless it is for extra bio filtration or support for larger plants or trees.