Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

HI. Interesting build, especially being solar.

A few notes.

In order to have my siphons working consistently I added an elbow and a horizontal section. It seems the water flow must displace the air entirely somewhere along the flow in order to create the suction affect - you did it by narrowing the exit tube. This is the reason the affnan Y collar works, it feeds a greater area of water into a smaller diameter pipe.

Just reading about your deep cycle battery. Be careful. Deep cycle batteries are harmed and their life is greatly reduced by regular low drains. Realistically you would never wish to drain it more than 80% of its full capacity and if I were you I would aim at a regular discharge of no more than 50% . Calculate the power consumed by the pump, the current draw on the battery and allow for cloudy days - in a row. Two batteries in parallel would be a safer bet in IMO. Even safer would be a pump cut off when the battery voltage gets too low. Realistically the system needs a control circuit to over charge and maintain a float voltage as well as alarm or cut off when voltage is too low. I have a country house that runs entirely off grid via solar, I've learnt a bit about how all this works...no expert though!

I agree with Di, your FT access is very limited.

Good job on the overall thinking and design, regardless it will work.

Cheers
Mark

Well whatdya know!? You were right about my battery. Its a dud. Voltage was 14.48v when charged and initially went down to 13.8 in half an hour. It only ran the pump for 2 seconds and now is sitting on 13v and nada.

I know this battery is good to run constantly for over an hour on a similar battery last year. I also have a solar timer so could have had it run shorter cycles to save on power. Sounds like you know your stuff Newt. I do have 4 smaller 6v batteries i was thinking about using too. Yeah its all a bit of an experiment. I hope to have a whole shed running on solar - lights, music and aquaponics. So more batteries i will have some time.

I will do some maths tmrw. But for now need to contact the ebay seller and get them to send a replacement.

I can access the front of my bath. Easily scoop out anything and could climb in if i really wanted to lol.

Hey my battery is all good after all! Just wasnt running through my regulator for some unknown (as yet) reason.

Had to directly connect the pump and battery. Its been running now for 1 hour and volts are reading 12.6

Left it for about 75 mins. Volts still showing 12.6 but pump has slowed down to almost half the flow.

I tried to measure the amps but almost fried my multimeter lol. The cables got super hot and a little puff of smoke came out the open plug. But it survived! Yes i am a definate beginner on all the 12v stuff...

Realised my timer is actually just the open/close type so is intended more for a garden hose which has constant pressure.

Back to the drawing board! I will be tranferring the fish over in the next day or two at least.

Try not to run it down too far and leave it for too long (more than a few hours or so).

You would definitely be better off with a battery bank of 4 or more all connected in series. This would draw a bit from each one and the charge as well as the batteries themselves would last much, much longer.

Keep plugging away at it. Suggest to wait until you get the kinks worked out of the electrical before the fish move into their future home.

Any place around that sells forklifts, or a marina, or maybe a large truck mechanic shop? All these type of places should have some extra deep cell batteries around. Might be able to score a good deal or two.

Thanks for the advice. Dont want to chuck any more $ at it thats the thing! Certainly not at the moment anyhoos.

What do you reckon would be the minimum amount of time i could get away with running the pump? I mean as far as plant health goes?

The norm seems to be to turn over the fish tank every hour for fish health.

The plants wont mind if you do a lot less than that.

Depending on the temperature, and how much "wicking" your media does, you might need to flood it only 3 times a day. With clay balls, the moisture travels up them like a wick. My scoria doest do that. From the look of your media, I'm guessing it would be more like the scoria than the clay balls, but your plants will let you know if they need more. Just test it on a day you can be there and watch them. And it that day is a hot day, you can be pretty sure if your plants are ok then, they'll be ok all the time.

Possibly given the situation, constant flood might be a better option. When it comes to deep cycle batteries cheap is a very bad option. I paid $250 each for my Trojan T-105's, they are 6V each and a very high quality gel traction battery, would last forever in your system. I think they are about 225 amp hours at C20...from memory. That means the battery would go for 225 hours at a 1 amp draw, or could supply 225 amps for one hour .....@20C temp...you get the picture. Of course thats full drain, work to no more than 50% of that on a regular basis. You're basically wasting your $$ on cheap Chinese rubbish....not worth the lead they hold.

No arguement there, but the dude is trying to make it work without dumping money in.

DDirt, you said you had some 6V batteries? Not sure what the amperage is on those, but like Newt sort of implied, if the draw is low enough, they may work for you. They can take more of a beating than the single 12V deep cell.

What are the specs on the pump, controller and anything else you have connected up? Some of those things have a ghost load. Your 12V book should have some charts to figure out how many watts/amps etc... Blast. Its been a long time since I was last into that kind of stuff. I'm running out of memory. Gonna have to go Googling.

And how many fish do you figure on tossing in there?

Aha, had to go looking way back on page 2... 12VDC at 7 Amps. (that's a big pump for this application)
Now to find the solar info and do some figuring...

Aha! (again).
Hook all those panels up. Your gonna need em.

Unless you go with the smaller AC pump, but then you'd have to have an inverter.

Frustrated yet?

Just tell me to shut up if I bug you too much, but I'm having fun.

I'm aware of that....but rather than buy more of the same low quality battery I was thinking it might be beneficial to save and buy better quality, sometimes we need to spend to save. One Trojan T-105 would do the job. Maybe he could devise a Stirling motor that runs off concentrated sunlight or some other heat source during the day...hmmmm.

Chime in chime in, no worries! I would rather think my battery as not being junk but maybe it is.

Moving into autumn/winter of course and down here that means wet and cold winter. But that also means less demanding plants... the fish i have are 3 goldfish and 3 minnows. They are super tough so maybe i can make this work.

Just need a 12v timer or battery operated that will hook into my system and at least can give it a good go.

Yeah also my pump is very strong... perhaps a cheaper pump will work out better than more battery power?

But first off i need to figure out why the battery is losing charge through the regulator. Same system ( minus the battery but it was 18ah) ran no worries for weeks last year.

No offense meant.....you might be lucky. In my experience it pays to buy high quality when it comes to batteries. One of the problems can be how long since the battery left the factory, ie, how long since it was fully charged. The worst thing you can do to a deep cycle battery is allow it to go flat. I once purchased a Chinese solar driven electric fence and the battery that came with it (deep cycle) was completely dead, more than likely because it had been allowed to go flat.

Is the regulator consuming power?

Yes i assume the regulator is somehow consuming power or perhaps increasing resistance. One man and a mulitmeter shall investigate! I do have 2 identical regulators so i do have a spare...

On a side note my little solar air pump has finally given up the ghost. It was aerating my rudimentary FT. So i might as well transfer my fish, the bathtub is bigger and better.