Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi All,

My barrelponics is getting there but I have hit a snag with my pump. I had an old pump lying around the Ehiem 150W 800L/Hr 3m head but I get bugger all flow at 1.9m.

I would little to upgrade this to a better pump that will give me a good flow of water. The barrelponics system as you are aware of has the siphon in the dump tank so the flow of water will determine the rate of which the growbed will be flooded.

Can someone please advise me which pump would be a good one and one that is low wattage so I can run it off batteries and still handle the height. Also one that will carry on to my next project later with a 1000L tank and 500L sump tank.

Cleaning the barrel, the barrels had lemonade syrup in them and even though I have wash them with soapy water, I can still feel a little residue on the inside. Any safe suggestions?

Cheers

Hi blackduck. I dont know if you received any replies re cleaning of barrels, but here is a brew I picked up somewhere. First use a good cleaner, [I used jasol]then wash with vinegar to neutralise the soaps. Then a final wash with a bleach wash.Then a good wash out with clean water. Regards tru-blu[By the way I am located up in the plains area nth of adelaide.] Hope all goes well.

No replies besides yours.

Thank you VERY much for that information. I will get that stuff tonight.

Hi Blackduck
The old pump you have there uses a lot of watts for only 800L/hr, might be best to throw it out. I have been using an ebay resun fountain pump 6000l/hr for the last 5 years and this pump only consumes 80 watts of power. Also it is important to remember the higher the lift the less volume you can pump. That size system and lift i would suggest around a 3000l/hr pump with a timer 15 minutes on 15 minutes off. This should only consume about 25 watt hrs assuming the pump is 50 watts. If you are planning on running the system on batteries using a solar system this could be quiet expensive and impractical. In my opinion if you want to go green it would be much more practical to have solar panels installed on your roof and feed back to the grid in order to offset your aquaponic energy use.

Hi Peno,

Thank you for that. I looked out the resun 6000L/hr and it is rated at 130W which is far more efficient than the one I have. I have a 120W + 15W solar panels sitting around doing nothing so I may as well make use of them for this system

I just need to find some deep cycle batteries but I'll take your advice and order one off eBay.

As for timers, where do we get these timers from?

Actually, I just found some 15min interval timers on eBay too, thanks.

Just a thought occurred to me. Fish do not need massive amount of light, just enough to determine it is night and day hence why covering the fish tank to kill off alge is commonly done. Do people apply that same technique to growbeds. Reading I see a common frustration of aglae going wild in their growbed. Wouldn't one way to alliminate this is to have a black plastic sheet covering the growbed with holes punched to allow your plants to come through. This will kill of algae and also provide warm to the root area that plants love.

Is there a problem with covering GB? Do the good bacteria that is part of the Nitrogen cycle require day light? I would only cover just above the flood water level. Or would it cook the root? Would it effect the autosiphon if I later move that way? It wouldn't be air tight so I can not see that happening.

I would suggest that 6000l/hr pump is possibly too big for the system, but if you still want that size, try
http://www.rockaroundtheblock.com.au/product.asp?pID=329&cID=63. Less watts... It would be best to get a pump suitable for your system now, and then buy another pump for your future system...

Also looking at your photos, you will need some side braces for the growbeds... After you fill it with media and water, the sizes would bow outwards...

In regards to your covering the growbeds question... first of all, your flooding level should be about 3cm below the top of the gravel surface... in short, the top 3cm of your gravel or media will never get wet to support algae growth... The pipes distributing water to the growbeds should be either as close to the gravel surface as possible or below the gravel surface.

So there is no need to cover the growbeds since if you do it right, your growbed will not support algae growth...

Side support is planned ivansng, but thanks.

As for size of pumps, well these days there is hardly no difference between 3, 4, 6000L pump so I guess if I go for one for future systems I can alway adjust the flow on the dial where if I get a pump suited to this setup, I'd have to buy another. I ended up deciding on a 4,000L/hr pump at 90W. I can expect a flow 1,000L at 2m.

As you start building experimenting you start to realise, damn I could have done that part better like getting rid of the dump tank all together due to the fact that it sits so high up and be more efficient and just have bell or loop siphons in the growbeds and just flood the GB directly.

I guess the original idea for the dump tank was to avoid extra electronics such as timers.

What I did with my barrelponics system is to use a siphon inside the dump tank. Fills up, then dumps the water in the beds, and you can do it easily within the dump tanks just using a few elbows and short bits of pipe.

at the rockaround the block site they have a pump calculator that you can enter pipe size, head, pipe length and pick a pump and it will give you flow, really get a bigger pump than you need, you can't pump too much water in my opinion and allows for expansion, the resun type pumps are the lowest wattage I have used, I have a Tornado pump 12,000 LPH and draws about 150 watts,

Giddy Up!

Yabbies arrived today and boy have they looked after me. I ordered 2 x females (berried) and 2 males and received 3 of each. How very nice of them. Aqua Blue Seafoods ( http://www.aquablueseafoods.com.au/price-list.shtml ). Most of them are a beautiful blue.

So I put them all into a 55 lt tub for now while still sorting my brood stock tanks but as I was working on the tanks I could here something scraping towards me. To my surprise I found a slippery sucker doing a runner. Lesson one, do not have the water level to high so they can get a leg over.

I separated the males from the females and put one male on it's own and paired up the two biggest males, all with plenty of cover. Kept the females together for now but the plan is the separate them so that the babies are safe from hungry mums.

Cross fingers, hopefully I can serve sweet yabbie meat by Christmas.

wrong.
Lesson 1: NEVER leave a yabbie tank without a lid.

Yabbies are marbelous escapologists. Don't turn your back for a second.

Just remember that with yabbies, it is not about the amount of water they have in their tank (although they still need water), it is about how much flat surface area you have for them... I think it was about max 10 yabbies in 1 square metre. If you try to put more in there, they will reduce their numbers by fighting and killing...

And never introduce new yabbies into an existing established tank.... it will produce a turf war that'll make the bikies look like lame ducks...

If you're planning on adding new yabbies... it's best to remove the existing ones from the current tank... and place them and the new stock into a new tank... where there isn't any defined territory....

Then, they can all be added back to the initial tank a few days later....