Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks Charlie took your advice on the Chili Galic mix and seems to keep them at bay

For a long overdue update:
We installed and backfilled extra fish tanks, and cut some extra grow beds,

and did some plumbing and did some planting


And I just made that sound a lot easer than it was

so the system now runs 5000ltrs of fish tank, 1000ltr sump and 20 grow beds running timed flood and drain through a single Davies pump and an indexing valve.

We currently have a little over 100 SP's and 22 trout with it ticking along ok at the moment but still getting Ammonia reading from the influx on fish

That's very impressive work.

Now that's an IBC system...

I'd love to have a backyard big enough to go crazy in, your grow beds don't appear to be painted, have you had any problems with algae?

Now that is an impressive system!!!!

Thanks for the comments


Our original system wasn’t painted but it always had a shade cover, saying that we haven’t had any real problems with algae, we do get a little colour around the water level of the grow beds but nothing really
The plants do a pretty good job of covering the IBC's on the original system:D


Among other things I do need to make a shade cover over the system to keep the plants happy through summer and prevent the plastic degrading in the Kal sun

I forgot to mention the fish tanks and sump are below ground and we have between 5 and 20 yabbies living in the sump (depending on who eats who on any given day) that keeps the algie at bay in them

Well for whatever algae you did get your plants look nice and dark green.

We always intended on covering the original grow beds with some type of trim but now it’s grown 5 times larger it’s not all that practical and we haven’t had any problems with algae, if the fish tanks and sump were out in the open I think we would have some issues.

Sunlight braking down the plastic (both IBC’s and PVC) is a bigger concern for us and is the reason why we will be putting up a shade house/hot house in the near future

Did you end up painting your system in the end? Some friends of ours have a nice IBC system a little smaller than yours that they trimmed with Bamboo screen and timber that looks great

I haven't finished my system yet, don't know what I'm going to use to cover it with, at the moment we're saving every dollar we can because the missus and my boy are going to NZ for the whole of December, so I'm just loitering, waiting to see if something I can use comes up on Gumtree in the freebies section

This is the friends system (old photo) that first sparked our interest in aquaponics, a couple of years ago It sports one of the cheapest ways of making the system sunlight tolerant and makes it look nice that big hardware store sells it cheap as chips

System is running well


It’s been close to 40c here the last couple of days and FT temps got up to 27, we were icing the FT flat out but lost a couple of trout so pulled them before we lost more! even though they were small


Up until now we have only had fish in 3 of the 5 fish tanks so when a heap of SP’s came up at the right price we went from understocked and confident with how the system is running to highly stocked and back into unknown territory

Some of the well established SP’s we got were looking pretty average after transport so instead of causing a potential problem in the system they got a knock on the head at about the same time we found out the dog seems to have a soft spot for SP’s
At least the entire family is benefitting from the system now

Wowsers! Thats a big IBC system Savness. Awesome job.

Did you grab Colins SP's? Ive got some big ones that I need to get rid of in a couple of months if your interested.

Yes we grabbed all of Collins SP’s, unfortunately today is backfill day for his system

Yea, its a shame he's shutting it down.