Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi Isaiah

Many sure that your inverter can run your Laguna. I have found that my inverter struggles to run my energy efficient pump. I have a pure sine wave inverter that runs most everything - except the pump! Not sure why but worth to check.

Nice try Logan, but you forgot to place your sneaky embedded solar panel link in the same font as the rest of the text, so now everyone knows your intentions

or just edited

I thought the Internet should get *me* to write those bot checking signup questions, but just a second ago, Mrs Bullwinkle read my post and read "bowel" as bowl. I guess my anti-bot questions would filter out real people as well, so might not work so well after all.

bowels do produce solids

I want to add to this discustion about a way I found to combine 12v water pumps and grid powered pumps manually using a float switch.

The float switch for the grid tied pump is placed by the fish tank drain, the pump is set to come on when the water level is at the lowest and highest off.

The water level in your fish tank will rise when water is being pumped into it, if only the solar pump is on and pumping then the water level will be in the middle and the grid tie will be off.

When the solar pump slows the water level drops to low the grid tie kicks in pushing the water level half way and staying on.

When the solar pump kicks in while the grid tie is working it pushes the water level to high and turns off the grid tie. The water level stays half way till the solar drops to low.

That's really clever.

Yeah it is, it deals with the vairing water flow of the DC pumps if you had a windmill or air lift
pump it would work too. Haven't tried it yet though. But it should work. Depending on your fish tank as mine rises 3in when the pump is on.

Neat idea Damien.

I'm struggling to picture the fish tank though.. in the scenario above is the fish tank the highest point in the system, with Growbeds beneath it?

ie:

sump > Fish tank > growbeds > sump

Trying to get my head around it working with auto-siphons etc?

In my system, (CHIFT PIST) if I get a blockage in the SLO, I have a tube from the surface of the FT that dumps to the sump. The last thing you'd want is more pumping in the event of a blockage, so an overflow might be a good idea.

A well designed SLO probably doesn't get blocked all that often, but a fish death might do it.

Mine recently got blocked due to a stack of dead tomato roots getting stuck. The tomatoes were growing bare rooted in the fishtank deep water culture style.

Or I could have read what you wrote properly

Just ignore that last post, although an overflow is always good.

This should work with any constant hight in fish tank system. The control point is at the fish tank exit. The growbeds will have to drain to a slump then be pumped to the fish fish tank.