Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all,
I've been a lurker for a couple of years, I'm in Victoria, Australia, and I'm building a medium/large system. I have waited to post until I thought I was at the point where it made sense to share. Last week I poured concrete, and I have tons of pictures. I'm still a bit of work away from cutting the ribbon, but you'll be able to see where it's headed......

welcome on board Eli
pics speek a lot on this forum

This is a photo of the tanks taken today, the formwork is almost stripped off.

Cheers Redbeard, had to resize.

The project started as a deck. When we bought our property we had this *definitely not to code* deck built on top of a set of quite substantial foundation stem walls, ranging in height from about 600mm to 1200+. Since the deck was so crappy, we ripped it off, and I started excavating the walls, with the intention of pouring bottoms and sides to lock them all together.

This site is below the house, on a sloping block. Each tank will be plumbed to the next, forming a continuous system that is serpentine, like a gut. The first tank will have an inlet from the house downspouts, which go to sewer at the moment but will be switchable. I will also be feeding kitchen, laundry, bath and showers into it eventually.

I hope you don't mean you will be feeding grey water into your FT

That is what I mean, and yes, I am aware of the risks and possible consequences.

So....with this being the case I'm assuming the grey water will go to the growbeds first and then the FT....Good Luck Eli, until i see it working I'm not holding much faith in it myself as soaps, dishwashing liquids etc are bad news.
Although I have just read your thread again and see no mention of an actuall Fish tank?

No, the grey water, when it is admitted to the system will go only to the reed beds at the 'top' of the system. GB water will only be drawn from the last fishtank, and returned water from the GB's will go to the reed beds, diluting grey water inlet. the last three tanks below are fishtanks. GB's will be in a greenhouse above all the 'ground' tanks. Phew, slow down fellas.

The first three tanks are reed beds with either reeds or vetiver grass. The next is freshwater mussels and maybe water hyacinth, haven't decided. The remaining tanks are fish tanks. None of these are GB's.

Ah....thanks for that, I could't grasp the fact you wanted to eat veggies from this

Cannas also work well for filtering we used to have them on our leach drain to stop the smell in summer

Sounds like a really interesting plan Eli, can;t wait to see how it goes...

I'm building a greenhouse over the last five tanks, the ones farthest from the house. The GB's will be in this, the outlet of these GB's will be fed back into the system, most likely at the 'top', but probably a lot of it will aerate directly into the FT's.

Well, I have thought about it a long time, and read most of the system threads here. It is as much proof of concept as anything, but I do hope eventually to be able to 'clean' all the water we use and also gain food production from it. In theory, this is more than enough biomass to clean up the huge volume of water we go through.