Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Has anyone used one of these for a fish tank or grow bed. For some reason, they are readily available where I live. Apparently they are food grade containers for oil, honey, etc. They are very cheap but cutting through the metal and plastic might be bit of effort. If anyone has converted them, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks, Rebecca

Do a search for IBC, they are pretty popular. I saw one person had cut the top off the plastic barrel about 400mm down and turned it upside down while using timber sitting through the cage to support it. Great meathod of making a FT and GB out of the one tank, looked neat too.

Here is a link to the system I was thinking of
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4757

Yep IBC (stands for international bulk container) make great AP system components.
Few words of caution.
Many of them are not UV treated so you should keep them protected from the sun as much as you can because the plastic can become brittle with time.
You want to be fairly certain that whatever it contained was food or food grade and not dangerous to fish. Soap would be very difficult to rinse away completely and is dangerous to fish.

Otherwise, many many people use them for their systems. If you have the right tools to cut the metal cage then cutting the plastic is pretty easy.

Enjoy and welcome

In the link posted... Siphonphobia didn't cut the cage itself... just the top of the tank...

Then used the exposed cage, with supports... as the "stand" for the growbed...

Here's the result...

Looks tidy but rather tricky to harvest grow fish out of those tanks.

Wow, I love that double decker design. What a clever use of space and materials! And the GB shades the fish tank, which minimizes algae growth. But how does one access the fish? And how can you protect the plastic from degradation--paint it?

Thanks for providing the official name, too. That helps a lot.

You can help protect the plastic simply by wrapping the thing is say heavy shade cloth or whatever cloth. This has the added benefit of keeping leaves out of the fish tank and shading it even more.

I've seen some IBC systems really dressed up nice using wood planks around the outside of the cage. There are many ways to do it. Some will sink the IBC fish tanks or sump tanks down into the ground part way which protects them from the sun around the part that is in ground.

Ive even seen some people read through a few threads before they join and start new ones asking questions that could have been answered with 2 minutes research using the search function .
not that its done that way anymore

just look a little bit further:
mine not only have the cage and pallet but also a galvanized steel plate protection all around
as you can see on my website:
http://www.aquaponics.eu
no real price difference

frank

Intermediate Bulk Container.....

http://www.vippackaging.com.au/?id=309

man those are super nice, they look so good when they are set up like that.

they want too much for them around here imho @ 120 dollars each and no history of what they contained.

they have big red screw top barrels also and when them huge greek peppers fall out i can ID them, but not the IBC contents

they sorta smelled like xylene, or mek or some other hot thinner to me. maybe even toulene but maybe not as that stuff im pretty sure will devour all plastics

i sure would like to have about 100 clean IBC

Do people throw these away?!?! I'd live to get a couple of them.

Not anymore... and you'd need to be prepared to die for them.... or pay...

In OZ they are prized yes, in the US they may still be tossed out. First hint of a drought though, and the price will go through the roof.
The price is so good over here, it'd be worth shipping them from the US probably!