Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

OMG, people. I am buying IBCs from Professor Erwin Corey.

I want ALL THE BARRELS.

MINE!!!

Who is Prof Corey? He looks like a good AP candidate. That's alot of potential sitting right there in his yard.

He was a character on the old Smothers Brothers show. This guy is awesome. You can tell he's brilliant, in a totally absentminded professor sort of way.

You asked about what is better, bigger fewer grow beds or smaller many grow beds. Well that depends a bit on the situation. I've done a 30' long gravel bed before. I don't really recommend that big.

4' by 8' or aprox that big is about as big as I really like to go on media beds now days. A bit narrower is actually better since I'm short.

Be sure to make your media big enough to drain well if you are doing siphons.

A tip for the sump, in wet places, sinking the sump into the ground is not always a good idea. Also trying to plumb tanks together down in the ground can kinda suck. Seeing as you are planning a long grow bed, you might think about simply doing a long sump tank built using essentially the same construction techniques you use for the grow beds. Essentially fill the footprint under your beds with sump tank. Now I know this doesn't sink them into the ground but sinking your sump in the ground only buys you something if your ground temperature also happens to match the water temperature you want for your fish. I have a feeling that the ground temp In Washington state is colder than what tilapia like but it might be appropriate for trout.

Good Luck and keep posting.

Great start but once you unload slip back for a couple more

I'm tall, so I think 36" is probably doable for me. Lava rock should drain well enough, shouldn't it? I'm pretty sure that's what I'll end up going with.


It is a wet climate, as far as wetness in the air, but what they call "rain" in this part of the country is more like a heavy mist; unlike what I was used to back home in Texas. And people here have basements. So I don't know whether our ground is really that much wetter than anyone else's, but I *would* prefer not to find out the hard way!


According to the Intarwebs, our average ground temperature here is 52F (11C). That seems kind of warmish, but I guess it's an annual average.

I'm still completely clueless as to what sort of fish I want to raise. My first thought *was* tilapia, because they are so delicious, but I think something hardier would definitely be a better idea, at least for getting started.

I suppose a sump sitting ON the ground, or even sunk down a few inches, might still gain me *some* temperature benefit. I say this because a few years back we had a giant snow storm (not that common; our climate is a lot milder than more inland areas at the same latitude), and I had a bunch of potted plants sitting out in the back yard of the house we were renting. I got stuck at the hospital for a couple of days (not because my truck wouldn't get me out, but because so many other people couldn't get in, so I had to stay and work), so I figured the plants were goners. Lo and behold, everything that was sitting on dirt survived, even a couple of fig cuttings my dad had sent me from Texas.

I'm intrigued by the "build the sump under the grow beds" idea. I bet my hubs will be intrigued too, since it would save him all that digging. Thanks for the suggestions. Bullwinkle is right, this board is invaluable!

Does anyone here have beds/sumps using wood/pond liner construction? Wait, that's almost definitely a stupid question. What I really mean is, whose thread should I go look at to see how massive the boards and fasteners need to be to hold that much gravel/water?

Coupling with ground temperatures of 52 F would be too cool for anything but cold water fish. So if you were to get the ground coupling going then trying to warm the water up above 52 F is going to be difficult since you would have to warm up the ground too. (Ground coupling works great where I am but our average ground temperatures are well above 70 F, well water around here comes out at 74 F.) If you go digging the tanks into the ground without insulation around them, then you should probably try to grow fish that like water near 52 F, like trout.

As to building with lumber and liner. I must admit that I'm not a bit fan of it because I live in termite country. But if you use Durascrim liner, you can build with a radius at the bottom corners of the beds and the liner will pull down rather than pushing the sides out so you don't need to build the sides as strong as you would if the gravel were pushing out. So then you just have to build the support frame and bottoms of the beds strong enough to support everything. This construction doesn't really work with the EPDM liner since it is more stretchy and flexible.

My thought was that if the water coming into the fishtank from the sump was already at something above air temperature (which 52F would often be, in the winter time), then a heater in the fish tank wouldn't have as much work to do to get it up to a decent temp as it would if the water coming in was at above-ground temperature.

But maybe I didn't think that through well enough...with the water constantly circulating through sump, fish tank, and grow beds, the ground temp might not really have that much time to affect it.


We lived in a log cabin for a while, not that far from here. It was infested with carpenter ants. I'm sure there are termites, too. (Funny how I'm suddenly discovering how little I really know about this region where I've lived for the past 15 years!) I haven't come up with many alternatives to using wood, though. Might need to go wander the aisles at Lowes/Home Depot and see what else I can think up. Concrete, maybe?

Get ready for a long read. It will be well worth your time. It is DecalsbyJT's greenhouse system. The journey he goes through in this thread is tremendous. In it you will find he answers you seek.

The only other thing I can think of is that 1 big grow bed means you need more sump unless it's constant flood. If you have smaller grow beds you can fill them one after the other with one of the various devices for distributing water, or cascade them. ie fill one, and have that dump into the next.

and also pro smaller grow beds...

You can use the corners and edges of growbeds by planting big things to over-hang the beds. If you have a 3ft square grow bed and plant a cabbage in the middle of it, that's pretty much all of the real-estate used, but if you plant one in each corner, you end up with 12 square feet of solar collecting planty goodness, as long as your growhouse is big enough because you need larg walkways to take advantage of this.

If I was setting up a big growhouse, I'd have some growbeds with big spacing around them, and some without for things like lettuce and strawberries that dont take up a lot of space.

And...

Another totally worthwhile thing is to use a growbed as a sump.

If you place a large grow bed at such a height so that it drains when the sump drains, you contribute water to the sump rather than take from it.

So a large growbed on the same level as the top water of the sump directly connected to the sump will drain as the water is pumped up to the other grow bed(s), and floods when the other growbed(s) drain.

That way you can make a small sump power two grow beds of whatever size you want (as long as they are roughly the same size) That also means you can have some plants that are easy to work on at a low level, and some that are easy to work on at bench height. If you put things like tomato plants and beans etc down low, you can easily reach to harvest. It also makes it easy to do things like grow pumpkins and melons down low in a corner, and train them through a gap so they live mostly outside.

TC first introduced me to that idea with one low bed and one high. It's odd that more people dont do it.

It's odd that I dont do it.

Oh, man, you guys, I need to SLEEP! Bad enough you gave me this Sketchup toy (the name makes me want French fries [chips?] every time I see it) to keep me awake all night, now just about when I'd talked myself into going to sleep you give me new threads to read (thanks, Ron!) and new design ideas? ARGH!

Gotta say, though, Bullwinkle, that low grow bed idea just solved a whole stack (as you've got me started saying) of problems I was having with my design. I just have to talk myself back into going to sleep instead of drawing it in *immediately*.