Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks been thinking about this for over a year now, and this is the best idea I can come up with. I will have almost 100 feet between my last grow bed and my fish tank. And I should have at least 4 rows of grow beds. This will allow me to run siphons, but also not effect the water level in my fish tank. The barrels will basically be constant flow draining back to my fish tank.

We have now setup the drain like mentioned earlier in the thread and it worked like a dream. Some photos of our construction day.
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 6b0be9e93b

My next possible headache is that I may need a very high flow rate since I run the water to 10 parallel growbeds. Will do some testing today.

It is working perfectly in our 3-in-one grow beds connected to 3 Ts and to a large pipe that acts as a beautiful aerator bar.

Here are two pictures.. 3-in-one grow beds and the aerator bar.

Looks great, but isn't it a costly exercise?
Having separate grow beds for control looks like a good idea but what if why we can't have two or three long grow beds in the same space.
Logic is what you think with your mind and know is right. May I ask what is your logic?

I have 7 beds running into 1 syphon been working for quite a while now,as long as beds are level
cheers byron

Three reasons
1) This design is not costly. These bluebarrel growbeds are very cheap. I get 2nd hand blue barrels for about US$13 each. So the blue barrels for these 10 growbeds only cost me $65. If I was to instead use three large growbeds (based on two IBCs cut in half), it would cost me around $400. The plumbing materials were not expensive either. So although I need more plumbing materials for 10 growbeds, it still ended up a bit cheaper.

2) The rooftop is terraced, so the blue barrels just fit perfectly with the space I got on the terrace. An IBC growbed would require extension of the terrace below, or some other kind of structural work.

3) This is essentially a community aquaponic project that will be shared by several neighbors. The idea is that each household owns one or more growbeds. Having a bunch of growbeds makes it easier to divide this into multiple households.

Very interesting way of creating a positive change in the community. I am sure it is a local asset.

Hope you don't mind answering a few questions on this.
Do the community members share the cost? A community benefit fund?
Or, is it a nonprofit initiative?
Do you meet daily or is there a set time - one day a week, etc.?
What benefits have you thought about to achieve using a community/social project such as this?

We have a non-profit pay-per-growbed space. So if the total cost of building the system was $1000, owning one of the 10 growbeds will be $100.

We have a schedule to make sure one household is responsible for feeding the fish and checking for pests and fish health every day. (Mon - household 1, Tue - household 2, etc.) Each household is responsible for planting and harvesting their own growbeds.

We meet on weekends or holidays to do construction/development work.

There are several benefits:
- Main goal: spread knowledge about urban farming with aquaponics to our community. We have lots of curious neighbors, and they'll get invited to the opening party.
- Participating households can be away for holidays and not worry about system maintenance and health as other households will fill in for them.
- Participating households get to know their neighbors and build trust between people in the neighborhood. Not only by growing food with them, but by sharing surplus crops.