Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

After the success of the first system I posted about in my introduction in the new members section I thought I would have a go at a larger system.

Ok I admit the small system was just a small pond with goldfish and ornamentals but I was pretty chuffed with it.

I figured that the driveway was way to big and under-utilised but I did not want to rip it up. I had installed a couple of 900 square raised garden beds and so figured this was the way to go.

After looking at a lot of systems I decided that I did not want a round tank, and I wanted something a bit bigger than a single IBC system.

The design I finally came up with was the raaised garden bed with pond liner, 2 poly fish tanks for grow beds and self watering containers converted for the vertical garden.

Last week I had it all running pretty smoothly and so planted it up and bunged in 10 silver perch and 3 koi.

Wny Koi you may ask? Because everyone coming in and out of our place would go past this setup and I just know they would always ask "Where are the fish?"

So there it was and I thought everything was going great and I was looking forward to the fabulous growth etc etc when this morning I am looking in the pond and:

Why is there so much food sitting on the bottom I don't think I have been feeding them much?
Hang about where are the Koi?
Hang about again where are any fish?

Yep, I don't have a problem with dead fish. I have a problem with NO FISH

where are they? cats? robbers? Birds?

I bet they are hiding and you can't see them. Fish can hide in the shadows of a fish tank. Try looking now with a torch. Good luck.

Nope I looked and stirred everything up and the koi are easy to spot.

I found one silver perch or it might have been 2 but definitely no more.

So today restocked and this time bird netting over all access points.

We have had Kookaburras hanging around lately and I remember having a major mortality event with them previously when I lived in South Perth.

I had problem here with my goldfish pond and white heron but putting shade cloth sail in the area they landed in stuffed up their flight path.

Kooka's though could land on the side of the aquaponics tank and then just dive straight in.

Anyway they are now stuffed as well!

Never underestimate the weight of water.

I guess sometimes the total optimist takes over my reasoning. It is not hard to do the math on water alone those 2 grow beds are worst case scenario 1000x1000x300 deep.

ie 300 kg of water each. Lets add some medium and as it soaks up some water it probably only adds say 20 percent total to the mass. So now my two grow beds are weighing in at around 720 kilos.

And I thought that the one 90 x 45 spanning 2.2meteres was gonna be sufficinet.

Who was I trying to fool.

This morning I added a doubler to it. Yesterday the sag was so obvious I was half expecting to come home and find the fish swimming with the plants.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been refining the plumbing and simplifying, simplifying, simplifying. I started off thinking I would valve each of the grow beds so they could all be controlled separately off the rising header. That turned out to be a nightmare trying to adjust it so I got equal flow to all three beds.

Then I had cut it back to 2 valves feeding the lower 2 beds and the excess going to the top.

It appeared to be fine but a week later I realised no water was going to the top bed any more.

At this point I decided that enough was enough and I took all the valves out and now the water goes into the top bed and gravitates to the bottom and then returns to the tank.

Kiss principle in action.

The photo is of the first set up with the valve stations and feeding all the water up with a bigarse pump and then trying to split the water between the vertical garden and the grow beds. Fine in principle but an ugly nightmare.

I now run a second pump purely for the vertical garden and I sacrificed one of the planter boxes as there wasn't enough head on the pump.

Again Kiss principle. Simpler to run another pump than try to bifurcate flows.