Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I've got a tom plant that was 2inches high with four little leaves at start of April. Its now over a foot high and got branches all over it. Main trunk over a cm in diam. Give them the right conditions, and they grow like stink. Should have saved the seed and planted them further into winter. Hope I have enough grow bed space for them to make it through till end of next years season.

I had bed flooding at tend of the first year, with a masive root system travelling the width of my bed, stopping at the down pipe. Flow stopped to a trickle. Went well in the compost heap when I pulled it out.

Forgot to give you a yell to have a look at your yabbies over the weekend. Off to Kattanning this weekend. Wonder if there are any in the dam out there. Brrr, it will be cold though.

Started making a hydro-cyclone today, using a 250mm dia pipe x 950mm long, 50mm inlet, 75mm overflow which extends 200mm into the chamber and a 25mm underflow. My pipe sizing is based on "Bradley Hydrocyclone formula".

I welded the inlet and overflow pipes in and will use a traffic cone as the conical part which will slip over a adaptor / bulkhead fitting at the base. I'm using a 20L transparent tub as a storage vessel with a valve and yankee coupling so it can be removed and emptied. I'm waiting on a pump i've ordered that will hopefully pump >200L/m through it.









Its ended up being over 6ft tall so I might have to sink the storage vessel into the ground to keep the top of the cyclone just above the Trout tank to reduce the head on the pump and increase flow.



Cheers

Love ya work Muzz

maybe run the 6mm tubing on a separate circuit and pump, put the coil of copper into the pond as a heat exchanger.

Running the pond water through the cooler may be prone to blockage or scaling.
Or you could run the pond feed through a insulated container (esky) which has a cold water coil in it.

Also if you get to run reverse cycle you could heat your Barra tank in winter!

BTW your system looks awesome.

Looks awesome Muzz !
Such a great setup/retreat

Hey Slowboat, if i do use the chiller it will only be on a small system in the shed. But I like Chainsaw's idea and just control the flow into the chillers cooling tank and let it over flow back through the stand pipe to the tank. But thanks for the thoughts

Installed the conical to my cyclone filter but my new pump hasn't arrived and I fly out on Monday, bugger. Start again in 2 weeks.....

Time to clean my brush filters and give the system its fortnightly going over..

Muzza

i would be worried about crap clogging the pipes in the chiller,

it will drastically reduce the efficiency of the chiller and blockages will be hard to fix.

You can run a clean water coil in the fish tank and your chiller will last forever.

If you tell me the chiller capacity, what size material of the pipes you have available and flow rate I can work out how much pipe you need.

Hey Slowboat, The chiller is an idustrial unit meant for chilling water down to near freezing. It is a 1350W unit, has a 50L tank which would normally be filled with a water/kero mix or gylcol. There is also a agitator in the tank to prevent this mix from icing up at below zero temps its designed to run at. Then there's the cooling tubes that I mentioned before that sit up against the refrigeration coils, there's also a 10mm stand pipe in the tank in case of overflow.

If I remove the 6mm coils from the cooling tank along with the agitator it only leaves the refrigeration coils in there. If I was to pump from a fish tank through a bio-filter then gravity feed sum of the flow back through the cooling tank of the chiller. The flow would simply overflow out through the stadpipe, which would be upgraded to at least 20mm, and then flow back into the fish tank. I would put a seperate thermostat on the fish tank and have it switch a relay turning the chiller on at 22deg. As the thermostat have a built in differential it would cut out when the temp fell 2-3deg. This way I can run the fish in the system and the chiller will cut in and out as required. There may well be a slight build up in the chiller tank but I could not see it being a problem.

I'm not even sure I'm going to use it yet. It would only be for a few horse ornamental Trout for the fish pond as over summer the freezer is chocker block with fish. So its probably not worth the effort as yet, but it would as give me a back up option in case of an emergency.

Got plently to do in the mean time.

My Misses saves a near disaster; we lost the power today at home from a storm and it seems my back up air system failed. Not good when there's 700 fish in the system . I'm assuming it was the battery, which was out of the boat and replaced as it was on its way out then (Idiot). It was one of those jobs that I was going to get to. So luckily my darling wife went down and checked on my system and then rang me for instructions. The pump was plugged into my brothers 2KVA honda generator that was in the shed and ran for 4 hours until the power was restored.

So guess what I'm doing when I fly home tomorrow. Buying a new deep cycle battery for starters. Plus I have two 95W solar panels in the shed of my boat and a 20 amp regulator which I'm going to put on top of my filtration shed to constantly charge the battery and also run the compressor if it was to fail during the day. Plus I think I'll get a 2nd battery next month.

Muzza

Close call mate

I really thought your response would be: "Buy my missus a huge bunch of flowers for saving all my fish."!!

It certainly was a close call,

I might pick the misses some flowers from the aquaponics. Don't want to spoil her. Technically I built the aquaponics for her as she was the one that wanted it. I'm just the one that has become obsessed by it.

So I got 2 1/2 hours sleep today throwing ideas around in my head, bloody hopeless.

Good move. My personal motto is "underpromise and overdeliver."

that was a close call Muz. I bet the old brain wont stop 'til you get home:
But better to happen now than later on when they are big.
It's great when the SWMBOs make that great contribution to the project. Like last year when mine rang me up at work and asked if she should put some more water in the tank 'cos she felt sorry for them in only a foot of water

You've got 700 fish in your system....