Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Using Nate's Zipgrow towers I have put together a tower system.

It operates on kinda a CHOP Mark 2 principle since I didn't want to put the towers high enough to drain into the fish tank and I also couldn't put the fish tank high enough to drain into the towers so...

Both the towers and the fish tank drain into a sump and the pump lifts water up to the towers as well as constant flow into the fish tank.

So I got it all hooked together today and dosed the system with ammonia to 4ppm. The tower media has been in my big system or soaking in the sump tank so should be well seeded with bacteria so I'm hoping that the system cycles up fast but I don't think any amount of mature media can get a system cycled before bioslime starts to coat the inside of the tanks so It will take at least a week or two before I expect it to really get going. I'll fishless cycle this for now as the blue gill are still really small and seem happy enough in the 100 gallon porch set up for a while.

So pictures!!!!!



I started out with the towers just hanging over a gutter but that was a bit problematic. I think with this many towers a gutter just isn't big enough.



That sump bin was also pretty small and wouldn't give much leeway for evaporation.
So...



I used a sheet of HDPE to fold together a sort of tank to catch the water from the towers and act as a sump. In the future I'll order the right size sheet to make a proper shaped catchment sump for under towers.

And of course need some more pictures. The cook got shots of me planting the towers. I need to make a higher bench to work on as doing this on the low bench too much would be hard on the back.

And my new method for distributing the water in the towers which has been working beautifully on the front porch towers for a while now.

and finally, the new fish tank. It's pretty!
This one is a 410 gallon tank which I have filled to just over 300 gallons leaving several inches above the water line, yay.

It is aprox 5 foot in diameter.



Like how I have the spray bar causing a swirl action?

That's looking pretty great TCL - nice work and great photos !

Yeah, the swirl action is good. Does the new FT have a bottom drain ? What's going in there ? More channel cats ?

No the tank doesn't come with any fittings. I could install a bottom drain if I wished but I figure I can stick a pump in it if I need to drain it and avoid any risk of a bottom drain fitting leaking or failing.
I'm not certain on the fish yet for this tank. It could be a couple months before my normal supplier will have channel cats available so this tank might temporarily get some of the bluegill. I've got a few weeks before I need to decide since I'm going to get it totally cycled up fishless before I put any fish in. I'm curious how long it will take to fishless cycle a new system with tower media from an existing system.

I've gotten the go ahead from N8 to put together tower kit systems so I think pre-cycled tower media could be a great value add if it can really get a new system going quicker.

Very Cool TCL

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how long it takes to cycle ! I'll stay tuned.

very nice TCL

What do the bottles do? Does the water run down the inside and thus get spread out a bit more?

You sure do beautiful work!

Looking pretty cool.

Exactly Swanberg! On the nose. Originally I would just drill a hole in the PVC cap pointing down into the tower but I was having trouble with slime building up on the media and then the water would start splashing out and this was not working for me. Plus with the hole down in the bottom or end of the pvc cap it tended to clog up more especially when water was being pumped directly from a fish tank to the towers. Anyway, I discovered that the one tower where I had drilled the hole kinda off to the side and the splash guard bottle was a bit longer and intercepted the stream before it hit the media, well that tower had less problems. The stream splashing and spreading out against the bottle then dribbling down into the media in a more dispersed manner worked better. So I expanded on that theme and started drilling the holes on the side of the caps just past where the pipe fits in so now the stream jets directly against the side of the cut off bottle and spreads out to dribble down and the hole in the caps seems to be less likely to get clogged as well since it isn't down in the bottom where the solids tend to collect more.

Before I discovered this little fix for the flow into the towers, I was about to give them up as too much of a pain for backyard use but it has been working well for me for months now. I have only had to clean out a cap once on the front porch towers since I stared doing the bottle trick and I was having to check them every other day before that. (That sucked as every time you pop a cap off you wind up with gunky water running up your arm and wetting your armpit and shirt.)

Now you just get wet when swapping/planting towers.

Ah, just found your Duckcam TCL - unfortunately it's 10:30pm over there so I can't see anything. I'll check it out tonight.

Well there are a few videos there to give you an idea till the sun comes back up here again.

The ducks have torn down another banana plant, I'm not sure if it's in the image though.

hey CD can you please post a link?