Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello All!

I have been into fish tanks for several years now, it is my hobby and passion. I have a 75g Reef tank and various freshwater tanks. I became interested in Aquaponics through various YouTube rabbit holes you go down, I can hardly remember how I stumbled on the first video. I thought..."This is awesome, growing plants in my fish tank!!".

It took me a while to get around to my first project with it, I used a little 5 gallon water jug, cut the top off and flipped it upside down and attached with PVC. It worked...sort of. However, I didn't know anything about siphons at the time so it was a constant drain system. I suppose that could have been fine with the right plants, but I wanted to do it better.

Second serious project is running off of a 10g tank and I tried to do it much better with a bell siphon. I watched hours of videos (RobBob Aquaponics & Backyard Farm!) to try and figure out the Bell Siphon. I am wicked terrible at plumbing and making PVC connections so it took forever. I finally got it working, plumbed, siphon engaged! I thought I hit the jackpot...well I am sure you know the rest of this story, endless loop of siphon troubleshooting now.

Have a help post in the General Forum! Look forward to reading through the rest of this forum!

For simplicities sake constant flood is the easiest way to go. My system has been running a couple years now and I've considered going to bell siphons but always decide not to. You need a fairly large sump to run flood and drain to be able to have room for enough water that your pump doesn't run out of water when flooded and your sump doesn't overflow during drain cycle... I have a 40 gal tank as a sump but I get so much evaporation in my greenhouse that I would have to top it off every day if I was doing flood and drain. If you aren't using a sump then you will stress your fish out from the constant fluctuations of water level in such a small fish tank... So I would think a small system would just be easiest to go constant flood. There was a comparison thread on here where they ran two systems side by side to see what the difference was and it was fairly minimal the difference between the growth in the systems.