Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have been designing and making a barrel system to compliment my current 1500 litre system with a 500 litre grow bed.

I woke at 4:30am this morning and started thinking about issues with this design and have not seen a clear way around the issue. The specs of this system are 1 blue barrel in cut into two halves and supported by a frame over a 250 litre tank. This tank was originally bought to house some yabbies but I have since put goldfish in there and am now going to put the two barrels above. See picture below (still incomplete in construction):



My intention is to run a standard standpipe drain from each and pump water from the beds directly into the tank.

The issues I can see are:
- am I being a over enthusiastic by having two half barrels feeding into this one 250 litre tank?
- will these two half barrels consume (hold) too much water during the pumping and draining phase (would calculate these will hold 100 litres between them)?
- should I have one of the barrels above the other to drain from one to the other then into tank?
- from the photo you can see my original intention was to drain both beds at the same time, is interconnecting them ?
Feedback and ideas are greatly appreciated

if you do constant flow i see no problem
(that is if you meant to say pump directly from the tank to the beds)

Ummmmmm.... sounds confusing... You're pumping from the beds to the tank?

Yeah perhaps constant flood, or put a barrel as a water reservoir above like in Travis's Barrelponics..

Apols if it all sounded confusing.

The fish tank is 250 L and will fit under the blue barrel halves in the picture. I intend to pump from the tank up to the blue barrel halves. Basically my concern is the amount of water needed for the grow media in the blue barrels v's what I will have in my fish tub below.

Constant flow sounds like a good idea so as to maintain a reasonable water level in my fish tub.

depending on the media, it will take up about 2/3rds of the volume, so you'll need about 70 liters to flood the barrels..
that won't be too much of a fluctuation in water levels if you do set up a siphon
constant flood is nice though

F&D would work and not cause you problems. However, my experience with half blue barrels would suggest you have a wider support at each end of your GBs or they will deform. Mine are supported on sleepers about 8" wide and even then the barrels have sagged between the sleepers.

I also feel that the GB supports are not suited for the GBs you plan to use.
I use trampoline frame steel alongside each half barrel and use hoop iron to support the drum halves about 1/4 way in from each end, to minimise drum half distortion.

Thanks for the advice on water levels. I will go for continuous and then experiment with flood and drain. Just need to get some expanded clay from BYAP this weekend.

As for the structure of the stand, cheers for the feedback on the construction. As mentioned earlier this was the non-completed version. I have since continued to reinforce the sides for support. I will post pics ASAP to see what you all think.

Cheer again.