Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Howdy,

I'm looking to run both an air pump and water pump from a trickle fed battery (or two in parallel). The air pump would be constant on and the water pump used to flood the two grow beds, running off a timer.

Air pump is easy to find. Just wondering if anyone can recommend a 12v water pump which would be able to adequately pump water from a 1200L fish tank to the two grow beds. The height is roughly 1.5m.

Obviously it will need to handle reasonably large particles (5mm?) and be able to start and stop constantly.

Thanks! Paul.

I'm planning on making up my own backup pump with a 24VDC 100W motor driving a washing machine pump. It should be able to handle a few chunky bits without any problems, and stop start operation wont bother it. 100W may be more than you need, although how much power it actually uses is somewhat load dependent, but I'm sure there are smaller motors available somewhere online.

You might find something amongst these threads

search.php?keywords=12+volt&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

Most of the washing machine pumps I have only draw 30watts and will work well through a inverter and they handle a lot of crap.I have had two 9 hour outages over the last few months and they were still going well when the power came back on.

Was in "Whitworth Marine & Liesure in Adelaide yesterday and seen 12V pumps (Bilge) about 1200LPH for $12.50 on special. Don't know if this helps?

What about killing two birds with one stone and trialling a home made airlift pump, 12 volt air pump could run it and the water would be well and truely aerated.

If you were running a SLO to your growbeds and gravity to a relatively deep sump from the growbed an airlift in the sump would aerate and pump.

Thanks for the replies.

I'm going to find a washing machine pump and try that out first.

Burnsy, I've already started building my setup and wouldn't be able to work a SLO system into it.