Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have been starting seeds indoors in northern Wisconsin for the past two springs with good results and decided i want to try my hand at some aquaponics. I have been keeping freshwater fish on and off for the last 20 or so years to some degree and I am now currently having a guppy bloom so to speak, so I figured its time to put my abundance of guppies to work. Right now I have a 29 gallon planted tank for the guppies that relies heavily on biological filtration with a ac110 running a prefilter sponge on the intake and filled only with Bio media, and a Rena xp2 with a coarse and fine filter in the first basket, and the second basket filled with only Bio media. After doing a bit of reading on aquaponics I realised that my tank isn't too far off from an aquaponics system aside from the fact I'm growing decorative plants underwater.

Today I built a pretty basic system that appears to be working for the last two hours or so. I have a 20 gallon fish tank and a 24" x30" media table full of lava rock (I still need another 1.5" of rock as I can still see water before the syphon starts) and a justponics medium bell syphon to make it all work. I am currently recycling a sycce pump from of my nano reef tanks to feed everything, but it is a little too much of a pump, but it has no problem pushing water up to the table.

I guess my main questions are how many fill/ drain cycles should o be looking for per hour? (Right around 12 minutes from syphon start to break how its running right now)

And instead of reducing the flow of the pump to not over feed the table and out flow what the syphon can drain, can I add a tee inline to the table feed and divert some of the water feed back into the tank to not only reduce overall flow to the media table, bit also eliminate the need for an air stone in the tank?

Thanks y'all, I'm off to go surf the forum now haha

Welcome to the forum Ty

To answer your questions.

The number of cycles per hour isn't that important and one every twelve minutes is fine. One an hour is OK as well. Basically as long as the roots have moisture and are aerated the plants will be fine.

Re diverting the flow - yes this is a good thing to do and my guess is that most of the people here use a T off of their pumps to aerate the water and regulate the flow.

My only concern is that by using different fill rates going to the grow bed your siphon may not kick in so you may have to play with it a bit. If you can't get the siphon working then you can convert to a Constant Flood setup where you don't use a siphon, the pump runs 24/7 and the grow bed holds it's water up to the top of standpipe - basically the water is always flowing so it's always aerated. FYI - this is also a good way to add grow beds without needing to increase the tank or sump size.