Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Alright well my system has been up and running for about 6 months now... It's got about 20 small feeder goldfish in it now in only about 120gallons of water. However I'll be expanding the system shortly to about just under 500 gallons(2 ibcs) and I'll be using the ZipGrow towers from Bright Agrotech, about 60-80 of them. Im going to be using the CHIFT PIST system with the sump tank buried in the ground so that the towers will be ground height.












and this is what I will be expanding to...

cool… how much space will you have around each tower? will you be able to walk around them and will the plants at the bottom get any light being so close together? Have you done calculations on how many fish you need to supply the nutrients to all those towers..
looks like it ail be great though..good luck!

Each tower has 18" front to back and 22" side to side, with that spacing I should be able to move between them easily, and there should be more.than enough light making it to the back row bottom plants. Also.. its not exactly the best image of it... but there is about a 3.5' gap between the two groups of three rows, and they are not orientated properly... they should be facing to the models right. With that many towers and the fact that each one should be able tohandle 1-2 fish each without worrying to much about over loading the towers. At first I'll be stocking the system on the light side and having about 40 feeder goldfish in one IBC and the other stocked with about 10-15bluegils.

Look great. I m using the media from Bright Agrotech in my system, but not the towers. Is this a small scale commericial or do you just have a big family?

In a CHIFT PIST you typically gravity flow from the fish tank into the grow beds then into the sump and finally pump back to the fish tanks. The grow beds provide filtering before returning water to the sump. Nate has some videos on plumbing of his tower systems where he mentions they are CHOP2 systems, gravity flowing from the fish tank through a filter into the sump and then pumping simultaneously back to the fish tank and grow towers.

"Each tower has 18" front to back and 22" side to side, with that spacing I should be able to move between them easily..."

There is never enough room when plants start growing.

What all kinds of plants are you gonna grow?

Sorry, I misspoke, its a chop2. I get them confused a bit. in the towers I'll be growing greens and leafys(kale, lettuce, swiss chard) and herbs. It's going to be a small commercial system, going to build it for a CSA I'm starting in the local area.

Wow, way to use that vertical space! The nice thing about towers, is that if it gets too crowded, you can move them easily.

Are the drains under the towers going to be open like in your image? Just wondering if you will get a lot of algae growth?

Im thinking about putting down some sort a shade cloth over them for just that purpose. Unless someone smarter than me(not that hard) thinks of something else that I can use.

Yeah something to cover it is probably good… I have 100mm round PCV pipe that my towers used to drain into through a small opening in the top and it still grew a bit of algae at times..

You could always use sections of whatever you have as the drain pipe but placed upside down on top of your drains.. perhaps hinged on one edge in some simple way so you can flip it open to inspect easily

I'm literally just using basic gutters for it right now actually, they drain into a 3"pvc pipe, nothing to elaborate

nice looking design. looking forward to seeing the progress. good luck!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10 ... greenhouse

So I dont know the rules on this... but I started a kickstarter to atleast fund the greenhouse itself

So, I got a bit of the system done, all I have to do now is hook up the towers into the system. The reason the sump tank isn't further into the ground is cause... well... there is a 3' thick bedrock only 2' down which sucks!!!