Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have as part of my system a 10000 ltr fish tank. a submersible sends the water every hour to 9 growbeds. The water leaving the grow beds is clear. however the water in the fish tank has a large amount of solids in suspension. if i take a sample the water clears in about an hour and the sediment sinks to the bottom of the vessel. I have a spare submersible so im thinking of making a mechanical filter and running it via a timer. I saw a filter made from a wheely bin can someone send me a link. I dont know if its on this site or not. Any help would be great.

Try leaving your pump on 12 hrs providing you have an overflow in the beds

Yep, simply send the water to the grow beds more often or for longer periods of time till you reach the point that your water is clearer. You are probably just not filtering enough of your water in your current timing.

the problem is the sump tank is only 2250 lts so if i run the fish tank pump too long the sump overflows before the next sump pump turn on. does that make sence? when i cleaned the tank recently there was much to my surprise very little sediment on the bottom of the tank. ony a bit of sand from the plants hanging above the fishtank. So im thinking a skimmer box or air pump etc.

can you adjust the timing so that instead of only pumping once an hour perhaps you could do twice an hour?

your sump should be running on a float switch not a timer you are asking for trouble

+1.....thats a HSM just waiting to happen

Bluefin,

My system is no where near as big as your system but I do employ a DIY biofilter to keep the water clean and to act as a bacteriae habitat to keep both fishes and plants happy. Since my growbeds use the conventional raft hydroponic setup, by no means do my growbeds act as a filter, it just passes nutrients to the plants thus the need to use another submersible to act as the filter pump. Just bear in mind that the turnover rate of the filter pump should be about 1-3 times of the tank capacity per hour. You may work with less, all you need to do is try it out yourself. Google out some designs, I find that the water inflow at the bottom works best!

Here is my blog entry on my biofilter: http://mahfudzaquaponic.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-about-filter.html

Cheers and best of luck!