Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

OK

This system was designed for coldwater species.

Why? Higher temperatures lower the oxygen content fast.

You could try it with warmer water species but be aware there are solids (albeit broken down to silt) floating around the planters and attached to the bio-film all over your plants root systems, This demands a lot of oxygen to be broken down properly.

There has been success using these guidelines for tropical tanks but the man who did it had made his system so the fish in the lounge had water dropped down to the basement (and cooling on the way) then back up and into a feeder tank (heated) then to the tropicals at a better temp. His system was brilliant, albeit expensive and complex, and hats off wherever he is now.

The formula is easy for USA folk 1:2:4

1 lb fish, 2 gallons medium (as in enough medium to fill the space of what would be 2 gallons of water) and 4 sq ft of canopy space.

Medium is gravel, hydroton, scoria, who cares - houses bacteria.

Canopy is the area taken by your plants from an aerial view. I know it's rough but it works. Plants in this system should be big'ns. tomatoes or peppers or eggplant type thing. Waste of resources putting a planter together for lettuce etc, get a growbed.

For we downunder types

Roughly, and there is no need to be completely anal on this, AP is forgiving .

1/2 kilo of fish
8-10 litres medium
0.35 - 0.4 m2 canopy

In my system I have roughly 1 kilo (less) of fish at present (5 10 cm ish goldies and 2 12 cm ish black comets), the plants are a bit young so I'm feeding very lightly till they 'take'.

You'll know when your plants take

It is best to use this system as a continuous cropping system as a large part of the bio-filtration occurs on the plants root systems. Those planters get full of roots, a MASS of them on each plant. I try to always have 3 plants on the boil and a seedling/clone coming through in the fourth immediately a plant got harvested. Of course I dumped the dope, changed some water, and am observing closely till I get plants back 'online'.

The netpots get spun 360 in the planters manually each week as plants get bigger to stop roots clogging pipes. I've had a root make it all the way out to the tank one day so yeah, worth spinning those netpots.

Confused (I think I am )?

nice one. It answers a few of the questions as to why my DWC rafts didn't work

Change nothing! its a finely tuned machine. thanks for the break down, it was enlightening.

Part of my brain must have been on holidays yesterday, i kept thinking "But WHERE do the solids go?"

DER! i was happy for joels system to "eat" solids but couldn't make the connection with UGFs. sleep deprivation.

was too focused on fish only UGFs.

Hey no worries mate, I'd smoke a peace pipe with you but gave it up haha.

Knew you knew that stuff so I assumed (doh never assume) you were yanking my crank.

No need for the pipe, and you know what they say about assumptions

Jaymie,Auckland/Wellington time is 2 hours ahead of us (Brisbane), they are on DST now so make that 3 hours (Daylight Saving Time)

I was under the impression that zero head height was the height of the water that the pump is pumping from and the depth of the tank is irrelevant, so you would be pumping only 45cms
My understanding of this is due to when the pump is not running the water level in the pipe will be equal to the tank level (as long as one way valves are not in use) - not that it is much difference.

Like how it is coming together

Haha! Wondered why I got such good performance at that height.

You old dogs can teach us sprites new tricks!

Good explanation AA. Where I was lost originaly was that I didn't realise that the UG filter was in a different container to the plants. This is correct heh. You have 1 UG filter (in a barrel/drum) which sits between the fish tank and the planter containers.

I know you don't want people to say 'why don't you change bla bla' and I won't because what you are doing is clearly sound and works a treat.

What I will say though is that a similar thing could be done using your exact methods with the satelite containers, but putting the water through these after they have been through a planted gravel grow-bed instead of using the UG filter (grow-bed is effectivelly the UG filter). This is what I have been intending to do cause it suits my existing setup. I was going to use larger containers and grow some melons and stuff. I was thinking of having a venturi on the inlet to each individual satelite container.

I assume you know aqua fan from your other forum. I think he may have haad a similar system to yours (but more complicated). Yours is great cause it is simple, easy to setup and would be quite cheap.

Yep....I like it, too.

Hmmm. There's not a lot different in this from how I set up aquariums. Water flow, UGF configuration, and fishload are very similar. However, the subtleties might be what's making the difference.

The noteable subtleties are a) the two sizes of gravel, (and that probably does help trap the wastes to hold them still long enough to break down), b) the presence of the planters. (Although I use supplemental filtration with a UGF, I have never had plants in them.), c) Long-term establishment of the system without cleaning/siphoning gunk probably allows a better range of micro-organisms to establish themself to break down the wastes.

It works and it's great, AA. Thanks for sharing.

Looks great! For those of us comming from an aquarium background, I will sum up (feel free to correct me on anything that I have wrong, or ignore me if I'm just complicating it.)

UG filter in the fish tank with coarse gravel to capture the solids, and normal aquarium gravel to be the pre-filter for the UG filter.

Use high volume pump to circulate the water from under the UG filter into the Grow containers, and a venturi to aereate the water that goes into the grow containers. Grow containers are in net pots with media in it to provide additional area for bacteria. 2 exhaust ports, one as an overflow a few inches (5-7cm) from the top (to give air-root development area), the other at the bottom about 2x the size of the top inlet. Both exhaust ports run back to the fish tank.

Do I have it right? I like it - nice and tight, is basically like a fish aquarium, with plants to scrub the nitrates, and additional filtration in the grow containers.

Hey AA:
Neat and new ideas to play with. Where are the extra drain pipes going in the pictures? One goes into a PVC pipe and another goes further on out of view...

- The UGF is in the fish tank, not seperate, if that's what you said. It's just a UGF filtered tank running to DWC buckets.



- I offered this idea (growbed to DWC) several months back and got lots of pseudo intellectual babble as you'd all been to school (course) so got pissed off with trying to explain how simple it was. Yes I believe it will work very well not too sure on the nutrient spread after a bed though. Some quick tests would soon tell you.



AF learnt pretty much everything from my lead, he watched from background for a long time, he's an excellent planner. His system is brilliant, the first adaptation proving this can be tweaked many ways like the Spereneo model.

Greenedo - nice summary!

DD - The second drain is a safety feature and just touches the side of tank so it's not noisy.

Glad you folk like it, I love it! Looking forward to giving you Jalapeno updates

I've been kicking-around the idea of a "commercial" production unit that basically uses the same principal.
I got the idea after seeing aerogrow.com's product. Basically, it'd be a DWC with netpots sitting directly above an aquarium.
Something like this: