Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Apparently it takes more than genius to work a sketch program . It takes time. Anyway, picture this!

Your pipe comes out the side of your GB with, say 50mm pvc. Once clear of your footings you put a 50mm T vertically and glue in a piece long enough to be level or a bit proud of the your GB sides. In the bottom of the T you glue a 50X40 reducing bush, after you've turned out the depth tabs/ring on the inside. With the bush modified, you can now push a length of 40mm pvc through it till it is up to the height you want your water level at in your GB. This piece will need some holes for the slow drain and some sort of adjuster and you could glue it a bit short and add and remove an extension to adjust the depth of water or not glue it and it might slide up and down with a bit of vaseline to seal it .
If you were to manifold all your GBs together you could do the same (maybe a pipe size bigger ie: 80 and 50) with the T over your sump. Then there is no plumping after the T, just a pipe poking out the bottom and it doesn't matter if it leaks a bit. It would make all your GBs work together though so your sump might not be big enough.
You could not put holes in the pipe for the slow drain, and bung a cap on top (or better, silicone clear perspex on) and it should work as a bell syphon and you could have 2 of them, roughly set to drain alternately, but you might want a smaller pump then to run a continuous slow fill.................................

Sorry . You can have your thread back now. I'll just go sit in the corner till my medication arrives .

well Dexter, there is a saying, ' a picture speaks a thousand words' and I think now would be a good time for one! just jot it down on paper and snap a pic cause it sounds like an interesting idea. The system has now been cycling for two days and is running like clockwork so with luck it will stay that way. I spoke to a local aquaculture specialist today and he recons if I can get trout in the system now they could stay in till mid october and be a good plate size by then, which is great. I really was not happy about the carp idea. I really need to get the system working properly a.s.a.p as the pressure is on now. I planted a few lettuce out in a bed today. It feels strange planting seedlings out in gravel.

I'll have to find time to do all the Sketchup tutes. This method of posting a pic is a bit embarrassing but it should get the point across.

Hi Dexter. I see what you are getting at. Its like a standpipe that is outside the grow bed. I guess it would be a good option if one could not go through the bottom of the grow bed.

I seem to be having pumping issues as the rate that the pump pumps is slowing down. Its the swimming pool pump with the leaf trap sort of jobbie and it seems as though there is just not enough water being delivered to the pump for it to pump. The leaf trap is not filling properly with water and and now the growbeds don't fill in half an hour. I am no expert but I think this is my mistake. The input size of the pump is 50mm and the output is 40mm so What I did was go from 50mm down to 40mm and then the pipe goes to the sump, but then even worse the check valve that I had was a 32mm so I put that in so essentially I am trying to suck too much water through too small a hole in the check valve and the long 50mm pipe.

I think I need to make the pump supply pipe 50mm all the way with a 50mm stainless steel check valve in the sump with one of those mesh screen filter jobs on the end. Will this improve things I wonder? Only thing is then I will have the situation where the pump delivers more than the slo can manage. I will need to put a valve on the end of the tank input pipe to slow it to the desired rate. HELP!

I forgot to draw the holes in the standpipe just above the reducing bush. I don't know because I haven't tried it, but if you didn't have the holes for a slow drain and put an end cap on the top of the pipe, it should work as an auto siphon.

Your pump problems seem most likely to be caused by your pump being too high and too far from your sump. If you don't want to lower it under water level, you might need to move it closer (right next to) to the sump and the check valve (is it a flap valve or a springloaded ball in socket?) put on the vertical. Keep an eye out for a cheap sump pump or pond pump.

Interesting idea, I don;t see why it wouldn't work...

..... And the really cool part of this idea......

Perhaps a new thread.

Sorry Brian.

Interesting Dexter.... that's exactly the design I came up with to drain some cut slimline water tanks I picked up... that happened to have an outlet hole at one end...

Likewise... I've yet to actually try it...

Let me know how it goes...

Here is my outside of the GB Alffen bell syphen, it's the same idea as yours, but for more than one GB at a time

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=6279&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=30

once i got the hole in the top of the bell adjusted with the red tape, it has worked flawlessly sence

once i got it built, i realized that i should have used a T where the elbow is, and a 4way where the T is, with theraded end caps, so it can be cleaned out easyer.......

I am such a nit brain! The pump was slow because The pipe was basically sucking down on the bottom of the sump, kind of like when you put the vacume pipe streight down on the car seat. It was the right length but then I cut a notch out of the side of the sump tank for the pipe to fit in and it then reached exactly to the bottom. So I am back to a nice lively pump speed and a FT that gets dangerously close to overflowing! After the not very well cleand gravel has been getting flooded and drained for a few days the water was looking quite murky so I drained all the water from the sump today and cleaned out all the silt at the bottom of the tank. There was lots! I need to get a cover over the sump asap. It is low on the ground and the silty, lighter sand blows in there at quite a rate. I am also thinking I need some kind of basic filter between the pump and the FT to aid water clarity. I have probably slowed down the cycling process with all the new water in the system.

I want to get the trout going but am concerned about all the nitrate spiking and suchlike that we hear so much about. Time is of the essence... I wish some knowlegable and expierienced ap soul would just tell me what to do with regards cycling and when and what to add when. This is how I am seeing it currently in my head.

I am thinking to add some organic plant food to aid the plant growth
Then plant out the beds with letuce cabbage leeks and beetroot etc (winter stuff).
Then add a source of amonia (pee) How much I have no idea.
Then go and collect the trout and chuck them in.
All the while monotoring the levels of amonia and nitrate etc

I Think I will need to get an air pump too.

You could run an over flow pipe from your FT back to your sump so if your pump is outrunning your outlets to your GBs, your FT doesn't overflow. How's your hoop house going? Once that is up it might stop most of your driftsand and the water clarity should come good on it's own, but if you chuck an eggwhite or two in and don't have your pump sucking off the bottom, it might help.

Hay Brian,
If you are about to get fish, I would say no don't add any pee or fish emulsion cause that would probably only put you spiking about the time you go to chuck the fish in there and then you would have to choose about doing a water change that would only slow things down.

So, if you are about to get fish, then just get the fish and cycle with them. You just have to resist feeding very much during the initial 6 weeks. Do you have your test kit? That is the most important tool while cycling.

Would be good to do a round of water tests now before you add any fish or anything else to the system.

If you decide to hold off on the fish and want to cycle up fishless, that is great too. Pee is really quite strong stuff. I cycled up my initial 600 gallon big system using less than one pee a day. I used aged humonia since aging it allows the urea to convert to ammonia and kill off any e. coli bacteria that might be lingering in it. For your system, initially you could give it a couple pees to start (if using fresh, you have to be patient since it takes time for urea to convert to ammonia and become readable on the test kit) then wait several days and start testing to see what the ammonia and nitrite read. Assuming you managed to get the ammonia up to between 1 and 2 ppm, then you wait for that to drop and then you also wait till the nitrite drops a bit. Dose again once the nitrite is well below 1 ppm. Once you can dose to 1 ppm ammonia one day and 24 hours later both ammonia and nitrite are back to 0 you are cycled.

As to the check valve
Here is the kind of check valve I use (my pump is an inline pump above the water line and it is not designed to suck water up so I need to keep it's prime.)
http://www.aquaticeco.com/subcategories/816/PVC-Swing-Check-Valves/swing%20check%20valve/0
I also have a priming pot with a leaf basket mounted at the high point by the rim of my sump tank to also help my pump out.

You might want to install a bypass valve so you can adjust the flow into your fish tank (I don't like to have an overflow out of my fish tank back to the sump tank cause that just sends dirty water into my clean water sump.) Basically what I mean is T off the line that feeds to your fish tank and send a branch back to the sump tank, put a valve on the feed back to the sump tank. So if you need to slow the flow of water into the fish tank, you can crack the valve open to the sump tank. This way you can keep the sump as a clean water sump and if you decide to send some of that water to NFT pipes or a raft bed or whatever, you can do it without worrying too much about extra filtering for that water.

good luck with cycling how ever you decide to do it.

Great TCL. I now have control of FT fill rate so no more overflowing FT. Thanks. I went shopping today and went way over budget... I got the test kits for Ph, Amonia and Nitrate. I also got a fairly decent air compressor that puts out 50 litres a minute and pipe and a nice airstone, and a fair bit of usefull information from the shop owner.

I ran the initial tests, no temp yet, will sort that out tomorrow. Results where as best I could read them and it is not too east but:

Ph between 7.5 and 8.5
Amonia 0.3-0.6
Nitrate 5-10

I did chuck in about half a litre of fish emulsion and a bit of the other seaweed derived stuff, and today I peed in it once. It might take me a while to get the fish organised, so I may just go fishless cycling. It seems like a safer option. I checked the Ph of the well water and was happy to find it about 7

Brian,

You'll want a nitrite test as well since that is often the more persistent and troublesome spike, right when the NH3 starts to drop.

As far as humonia/fishless-cycling goes, I've found an old paper that found greatest growth in the bacteria we want at about 5ppm NH3. Humonia varies in it's concentration, but (assuming less than 50% urea) one could safely add at least 20ppm of humonia. That is 20ml per k-liter of water.
WARNING: numbers don't lie, but they occasionally get a decimal misplaced.... I haven't done this and can't be sure of the accuracy... and it is easy to overlook or screw-up minor vital details...

Hydro, sadly they had no nitrite test at that shop. I will keep looking out for one. This morning I woke up to find all fine, but later the FT started overflowing and two of the GB's not filling to the top. The sump was nearly completely drained in the pump cycle and the lettuce looked a little limp. Not great. I figured there must be some kind of blockage in the pipe from the bottom of the ft so I climbed in which was refreshing given the temp of 11 degrees! I squirted water from the hose down the troublesome pipe and sure enough a short piece of 32mm pipe with a fitting on came out. Problem solved. Probably a set back in terms of the cycling though. I took 3 pees in the system today. I am going to see if I can get some pure ammonia. I sure am glad I put in two 50mm overflows otherwise I would be chopping holes in the ft now! Thanks to all those involved. Here is a pic of the tank overflowing.


Here is a pic of the post pump bypass valve which is great. I only need to open it a smidgen to get the right flow into the FT. What comes out of the bypass looks to be perfect for a nice long NFT pipe or two one day.


I also got some fencing up around the system for temporary protection from all the small antelope we get here. They will make short work of my seedlings. I need more fencing though to finish the job. You can see the fence in this sunrise pic.


next on the agenda is shade/tunnel for FT and GB's and a sump cover. I have been toying with the idea of individual greenhouses for all the growbeds, a wooden cover for the sump and a heavy shade cloth cover for the FT. I would prefer just to stick the whole thing under a tunnel. I was thinking about a pvc pipe tunnel but synaptoman said it will not be strong. I think if the construction is good and it is well braced and has enough hoops and joiners made from 40mm heavy duty pvc it should be good. Only concerned about long term exposure to uv.