Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

hi all,

i have been keeping aquarium fish (mainly african cichlids) on and off for nearly 30 years and recently discovered aquaponics. having recently moved to a house with only rainwater i thought i would try aquaponics to filter the water from the aquariums rather than do water changes.

the main aim is to run 13 aquariums via an ap system, my priority is to have 0 nitrates with little or no water changes, growing plants is a bonus. i am guessing my cichlids will not produce as much waste as perch, trout and barramundi so the grow beds are only small but i have dont the plumbing so beds can easily be added if needed.

the total volume of the tanks is about 1500L and the growbeds are about 800L, i have a 500L sump (with capacity to increase to 800L if another 400L growbed is needed) and will be running a CHIFT PIST system.

so far most of the tanks already have fish in them with a combination of air driven and power filters ( canisters, hob's and internal powerfilters) there is a single air pump running all the air filters. Once i finish washing the gravel, fix the leaky sump and fine tune the pump and water delivery to the tanks i will start to cycle the growbeds. then with a bit of luck and lots of tinkering i will start turning off power filters and just have a single airdriven corner or sponge fliter in every tank for airation/ water movement and to polish the water.

i am at work at the moment but will post some pics soon.

as you can tell i though id go for a simple system to start with, has anyone else run a tropical fish system before?? any advise or tips will be gladly appreciated.

as promised some photos:

The fish room with the doors open, the room is fully insulated and tanks heated with submersible aquarium heaters, i hope to install a reverce cycle aircon to heat room one day, the tank in the foreground and the little tanks in the middle arent part of the system yet (quarantine tanks)



close up of sump,2270mmX 620mmX 50mm deep fibreglass tank, plumbed to the cut down IBC which can be used either as an additional fish tank or as a larger sump if needed


please turn your computer sideways to view this photo
the tanks are drilled and have 20mm overflows draining into 50mmpoly which leads to the growbeds


the growbeds, fibreglass tanks 2270mmX600mm with 300mm deep of 14mm gravel


thr green house frame, had fibreglass roof and will eventually (before winter) have double skin plastic walls and doors

Over the years I have found that the africans and american fish make just as much waste as any other fish if not more in some case. Currently I have a 60l tank running 2x20l grow beds for lettices only problem I have at the moment is not enough light coming in the window so the veg are a bit lanky. Biggest thing i found was heat loss thru the gb water at time has a chill to it.

cheers Drew

Well done

Welcome!!!

You might be shocked at how much plants you might need to bring nitrates to 0 from an already stocked aquarium. I have twelve little tiny tilapia in an aquarium and I've been having to water dirt plants with that water and top up with fresh to keep from sky high nitrates. That system is currently set up with gravel filters with house plants growing from the tops and only a pipe to grow other plants in.

Are all the aquarium separate or are they sharing water? It kinda seems like you are going to be plumbing things all together for this, do you really want to do that? Mainly thinking that if something goes wrong with one tank, it could contaminate all. Perhaps you should set up a section of the system as a separate quarantine system so you can keep new fish separate for a month before putting them into the combined system.

So you have this fish room that is insulated and the tanks heated for the tropical fish. However I see your grow beds outdoors. This might be just fine for the summer but in winter, you might have issues with the grow beds chilling your water too much.

thanks for the input,

Drew, glad to hear africans worked well for you, what pH did you keep the water?

TCLynx, i have 5 quarantine/fry tanks separate from the rest and all the fish i have have been swapped arround from tank to tank so manytimes they would been in contact at some point already.
i have thought about the cool water issue, i plan to have either a double skin on green house or use bubble wrap as an inner insulating later, there will also be a small fan to move some warm air from the fish room to the greenhouse. and i am also concidering using undergravel heaters that reptile keepers sometimes use.

i also plan to keep the sump half full and have heaters in there so cooler water from the gb's will have a chance to heat up a bit before being delivered back to the tanks.

this is a bit of an experiment and destined for either success or monumental failure

Oh good, glad you have already thought out the heating side of things and also the quarantine stuff too!!!!!!
Great work!

An FYI about pH. My system has been consistently between 7.4 and 8. Started out with well water with a pH of 8 out of a limestone aquifer. My media is filled with shells so I'm buffered to 7.6 normally but after the system got to about a year old, the pH did drop to about 7.4, my quarantine system has actually been as low as 7. I have to add quite a bit of chelated iron to keep the plants happy and acid loving plants don't much like growing in my system but I seem to do ok anyway. The only plants I haven't had much luck with in AP have been cucumbers and strawberries.

Five photo's in a row, so is the way to get more than 3..............put text in after each photo and then post another photo inline????????????? Just curios BTW welcome dogboy

Interesting setup DB will be good to see how things progress

Chainsaw the photo's are stored on photobucket and inserted by using the image button and puttin in the address of pic location, (img]http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll311/dogboy-photo/fish%20room/austdayandothers013.jpg[/img) for example, with the correct brackets would display the photo as above, this way you can have heaps of pics, well more than 3

ok so its been a while since i started this thread.

basically i decided not to combine the fishroom with ap. i became increasingly worried re heating costs in winter and worse worried about cooking the fish in summer.

so the fish room took priority in allocation of time and money and that is now running well, although could do without all the water changes!

i finally got arround to setting up the ap as well. the system has 3 of the fibreglass tanks as growbeds and a fourth as a sump, there is an ibc on top of the sump and a cut down ibc on top of that. water is pumped from the sump to the cutdown ibc, overflows to the ibc then overflows to the gb's and then back to the sump.

currently there are 60 trout in the system and the plan is to stick yabbies in the top ibc. it has been running for a month and seems to be cycling well.

will post photos when i can

Good to see that you have chucked the idea totally dogboy...

Well at least you can dump your water changes into the AP system for some extra nitrates

hi all,

a question for you,

the system has been running about 2 months now, trout are growing niceley
amonia 0
nitrites 1ppm
plants are very slow growing.

i am used to aquariums and any nitrites would have me doing water changes, should i do one???
also how long before i should see some improved plant growth? should i add chelated iron or seasol, if so what sort of concentrations should i use? ( theres approx 2000L water in the system)

sorry about the newbie questions but as stated im more used to aquariums.

Hi Dogboy, how long have your nitrites been reading "1"???

What's your pH and water temperature.... and what pump method/cycle do you run?

As you've now seperated your AP system... a few pics might help...