Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I plan on starting this system 'soon'



And here is a view just showing the parts.




The light blue is a 1000l fish tank - I hope for tilapia but the state of Texas may not let me legally play. There will be some film units (orange), some Floating plants in the purple tub and several half barrels for flood and drain.

At this time, I plan on two pumps and and a small air pump. There will be a continual pump that will feed the film and floating water tanks as well as a not shown bio-filter. A separate pump will be on a timer to energize a relay. This will flood the half-barrel gravel beds until full. When a float hits the high-water mark it will kill the relay, thereby killing the pump.

Capacities - fish tank 1000l; floating beds ~400l; 8 half barrels at ~ 70l each- 560l

Total of ~1960l

This will not be the actual 'layout' of the system. This only shows the parts and approximate levels. I will need to redraw this (after contemplation) and think of plumbing, drainage and access to plants as well as figure out how I am going to string tomato plants up and possibly put an aeroponic tub in to try that with the system.

A backup power system is being contemplated. I would hate to loose plants and fish due to a power failure. Power failures are rare here. We have had one of two hours in the past three years. The rest were to short of duration to effect an aquaponics system.


Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks,
Ron

Pretty colours ....., Other than that scarcasm ,, I think your plan lacks sufficient filtration ,, you only have 560 litres of gravel beds, the gravel holds the algie and therefore does most of the Ammonia/nitrite/ nitrate conversion.Bigger or more barrels ,, or fill half your DWC with gravel and you might be getting close.

I;m no expert ,, but that is the way I see it.

I think it will be a good start. Ron has said that there will also be a bio-filter (not shown), but i dont think there will be any lack of bio media even with-out. you MAY have clogging issues at some point with solids, but if you stock the appropriate amount of fish then you should be right. Dads system is only running 200L of gravel as a bio/solids filter.

Yep ,, missed the bio-filter addition.

personally i think a bio-filter is unneccesary unless you are wanting to heat the fish and stop the gravel beds being a massive heat-sink. Other-wise why not just have more gravel beds?

The 'extra' bio-filter is a 'safety' rather than a feature. The reason for all of the different methods is trial to see what grows and how. I hope to evolve this into a larger 'almost commercial' system.

I have water-testing supplies and pumps ordered. I also have gravel locally I will use. If it is dirty I plan on stirring the gravel in place and letting a diatomacious earth filter grab the dirt.

Basil, parsley, peppers and arugula are being sprouted. I plan on feeding those with a bit of diluted 'tea' solution from my well established worm beds. I have been vermi-composting all of the vegetable scraps here for years.

The first system I read about, years ago, was the one Texas A & M setup in the Virgin Islands. It had a 16m X 1m fish tank and floating beds for basil growing. IIRC, the rots were the only filter media.

This site has been a real time grabber and I have spent many hours gathering information here. It amazes me the high quality of the posts on this forum.

Ron

Just make sure your gravel is not limestone or marble as that can play havoc with your pH.

I've tinkered with many forms of Hydroponics before I got into Aquaponics. I find that having media filled beds makes growing plants easier than having to support them from the roots up. Even when I did NFT, I found that modified media filled troughs were easier though many types of plants will clog the troughs or tubes with roots and cause you blockage problems unless the troughs are very large.

If you do go for the water culture and troughs, you may want to feed them from water that has already been through the gravel beds and perhaps drained into a sump tank. Otherwise you will need the sand filter to take care of solids and keep them from fowling the NFT and the deep water culture.

You could perhaps set up the Gravel beds a bit below the top level of the fish tank and feed them by gravity from the fish tank with a venturi drain as in a CLIFT PIST (constant level in fish tank pump in sump) system. Then when the water drains from the gravel it could go to the DWC section and NFT.

In any case, I agree that more gravel is in order but it doesn't have to be done in barrels since they can get $$ in plumbing parts.

Now I've thrown all sorts of other ideas and levels at you to mess up your plan. Good Luck and keep up the posting of your progress!

Depending on if you can get the fish tank high enough, you could connect all the components into a series and use the extra pump for redundency. Here's what I suggest- gravity feed everything except the lowest point- the floating beds/ sump. Start with the fish tank, drain to gravel beds to clean water, run through NFT and drain that directly into the floating ponds, return with pump. If you use external stand pipes, you regulate the height of water in the fish tanks. Use the gravel grow beds to add oxygen to the water for the NFT, use a water fall to aerate water for the float beds- if there's too much splashing, just cover the ends with black, AP approved plastic and drape ends into the pond- you'll still get the water fall effect, without losing the extra oxygen benefit. It's similar to my design but you have NFT, instead of pipes that feed my ponds. Set it up with shut off valves at critical points and you can expand grow beds, if you need more bio-filtration, if necessary. Depending on how many fish you plan to run, you could get away with what you have. Contrary to belief, the ponds play a huge roll in nitrification, you have all the pond sides, including the underside of the rafts as well as all the roots dangling in the water and the entire system also adds a buffer of 10% as biofilm lines every surface that is wet, oxygenated and dark enough.
I hope you do get close to commercial capacity- that was my intent when I decided to show my design on this forum- that I could inspire others to have a large duel growing system so I can compare their results with mine. I don't know if you got some of your system's design inspiration from me or not but I have always believed that brain storming is better than doing it alone- we can bounce ideas off of each other and maybe something will click that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
Good luck.