Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Greetings from sunny South Africa

This is the idea that i have in my head and wanted to run it past you to see if you have any inputs or advice for me , i want to incorporate Media with DWC as i would like to use the media beds for what they are intended as bio filters.
Herewith an explanation of the design

3 off 4500l fishtanks
6 off media growbeds
3 off DWC growbeds
1 off sumptank

The idea is to run the water from the fish tanks to the grow beds and DWC beds via gravity feed as we are going to be using solar power to run the pump returning the water to the FT ,we unfortunately don't have government power as we are to far from the main electricity grid ,my questions are as follows
what should the water flow be in the DWC tanks and would it be possible for me to do it the way i have designed it ,the only problem that i can see atm is that the DWC grow beds will have no flow while the media beds fill as they are going to be running on auto siphons , or would you suggest that i run them on a different water line with water passing through a swirl filter before they reach the DWC beds.

The dimensions on all the beds will be 6m x 1.2m x 0.450m , the water supply will be from a river so i presume that the water will have most of the bacteria needed to give the system a good kick start ,the DWC will have air pumped into them via a air pump or venturi .

Could you be so kind to have a look at my design and give me some feedback on what you think i should change i'm doing this to help supply the community of Springbok with some fresh veggies and herbs and to get a income from it i only have one chance to do this right so i want to be 100% sure that the
design will not fail me , the fish that i will be using will be trout,koi and tilapia i will be stocking every FT with 450 of each species .

sorry i do not know how to load the drawing i made of the outlay:)

You probably don't have enough posts yet to load images. When you do (& I think it is 5 minimum) click on Full editor below the Quick Reply box and you will see, under the edit box, a way to upload files.

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I can't help on whether DWC needs constant flow or not; I have no experience with them, but GB's don't have to be flood and drain so you could make them constant flow as well and resolve the question.

Welcome Andre, most people seem to get away with their GB only 200 to 250 deep.
if you can supply the DWC from the GB this will give you enough filtration.

that is the general idea to let the media beds run into the DWC i just want to know if there are a certain amount of water flow needed in the DWC tanks and i am only going to fill the media beds to about 300mm