Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Fish still eating well, went to refill food container from fridge and found out I've used 5kg in about 8 weeks.

Just cleared a crop of corn, mixed success think I might have too much shade for it.

Fresh string beans are lot nicer than shop brought. Capsicums and some other stuff going great even the strawberry plant. Cucumbers are delicious grown in AP but my plants are all struggling with some sort of bug attacking the leaves.
Going to either prune heavily or replant tomato bush, its died off and not growing. Nitrates still in the red (20ppm?) and have been dosing with seasol regular.

Passionfruit would be twice the size it is. But I am pruning it every week to contain where it grows.

Not sure if this counts as my 1st "meat" feed from the AP system. Two of these were given to me from a private dam and spent about 18hrs in my sump.

The passionfruit now has fruit all over it but they seem to be taking a long time to ripen. Perhaps too much shade

Some of the passionfruit were as big as large oranges so I cut a few open.
Despite only having a light purple ting they seem ripe. So far picked a bucket worth.

Even with pruning its a nutrient hog nitrates sitting at 5ppm all winter. Silvers still feeding most days since the water has been hovering right around 15deg. I know as soon as it drops below 15 they won't want much.

After doing an evaluation of my power usage a fair bit was the 24/7 load from the aquaponics system.

Testing proved that my MGE UPS being used for backup were not the most efficient devices either. Hence a new upgrade in progress. Just changing the AC inverter made a 60w improvement.

Setup is operational but the panels need to be permanently installed and a few things cleaned up.
The 500w of panels runs the system during the day. At night/high cloud the voltage drops slightly on the battery bank from 56 to 52v and the small AC-DC power supply starts supplying current to maintain the bank.

As it's AC fed at night a big battery bank was not required and currently still using the old MGE UPS external units.
During power fail of course the system runs on battery until the inverter stops due to low volts. I have installed RCD protection on the output of the inverter as well to improve safety. The circuit breakers currently without a cover are DC 48v for the battery all higher voltage ones are in enclosures.

Aug 2010 started.

Had a small harvest of about 15 in December of the largest.

June 2013 another 35. More left but smaller so keeping them alive until have freed up fridge space.



Managed to catch 5 of the "stunted" ones, all had deformed lower jaw at least another 2 of those left that were too fast even with tank 1/2 drained.

Nice harvest!

Really nice setup, enjoyed the info, thank you