Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here are some pics of finished board, the empty space is for future relays when needed.

So far the system is running well, no fish deaths and plants are growing really well. Harvested the nicest small radishes and loads of swiss chard. Planted some baby marrow, sweetcorn, cherry tomatoes and waiting for chillies seedlings to grow a bit more before going in GB. Have problems with snails munching my small seedlings, hope they like the snail bait more than the baby pak choi. Had to drain alot of water in the past 2 weeks due to heavy rains, thinking of draining halve of the FT water so that a bit of rain won't over fill the tank.
The arduino temperature controller is in and working perfect, it controls the solar water heater, the heatmat for the seed trays and displays the FT temp.
I used the following code for the solar heater pump control:
tempC = FT temp
outsideT = outside temp in sun

if(tempC > outsideT)
{
digitalWrite(SOLARPUMP, LOW);
}
else if(tempC < outsideT)
{
digitalWrite(SOLARPUMP, HIGH);
}

Jaco, I like your system. You gave me now a solution for my insulation problem. We are buying the same brand dog food for our dogs.

Thanks Cobus, the dog food bags works very well, it kept the FT water at 17C during the really cold nights that dropped to 1C and the max temp for the previous day was about 23C. I also keep the pumps off from 5pm till 8am. I need to find a better way of strapping the bags to the FT, the cling wrap does not last very long as expected. The best long term solution is probably to encase the FT in a wooden box.

I think the wooden box is the way to go you can then maybe get additional insulation material (Think Pink?) in the cavity between the FT and the wooden box.
I'm in the building industry and due to new building insulation requirements general thin bubble type insulation will now almost become redundant.
So I hope that I will be able to get it a good price in the near future because I will have to install a lot of insulation for the system I’m planning. But for now I will go for the dog food bags for my small system.