Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

As far as I am aware the following is an original idea.

This idea does away with siphons and sumps.

It works as follows

When GB 1 is full of water it activates a float switch that starts pump 1.
Pump 1 pumps water into FT1 which overflows into GB2.

When GB1 is empty float switch 1 turns off pump 1

When GB 2 is full of water it activates a float switch that starts pump 2.
Pump 2 pumps water into FT2 which overflows into GB3.

When GB2 is empty float switch 2 turns off pump 2

When GB 3 is full of water it activates a float switch that starts pump 3.
Pump 3 pumps water into FT3 which overflows into GB4.

When GB3 is empty float switch 3 turns off pump 3.

When GB 4 is full of water it activates a float switch that starts pump 4.
Pump 4 pumps water into FT4 which overflows into GB1.

When GB 4 is empty float switch 4 turns off pump 4.

ok thats a novel design i havent seen before.
not 100% sure if the system would turn over FT volume every hour since it goes in sequence, maybe thats a detail that could be worked out when setting up/deciding on pumps.

If one float switch fails, all fails.
Fail.

Yep, that's a problem with float switches, solenoids etc, they can and are prone to failing.

You can get float switches that are reliable (as reliable as anything else anyway) so the reliance on float switches is not a fail in my mind. However, how do you monitor the system and install an alarm system that lets you know when there is a problem

I enjoyed our chat yesterday.

One of the reasons I was keen to meet was because your ides are so different from mine. If you surround yourself with people who agree with you all the time your creativity can stagnate. Even if someones ideas just serve to confirm your own at least you can act on your own ideas with greater confidence.

Which is why I get so upset when conversations between forum members who fundamentally disagree with each other degenerate into snarkiness and name calling. A valuable oportunity disappears and constructive conversation stops.

Since this is in the commercial section...

If you haven't already you need to read Timmons because you are wanting to do something so different from standard practice it is important for you to understand the standard practice so that you understand why things are done the way they are so you can attempt to do them differently.

Using IBCs for your FTs limits your scale and we have discussed that previously but now that i have a better idea of what you are intending I can offer some other things for you to consider.

In any system I design there is always the duty pump and the standby pump. This doesn't have to be two pumps it could be another number like 3 with two duty pumps and one stand by. Pumps can be very reliable and large three phase pumps can run continuously for years (one example the manufacture recommends repacking the bearings every 5 years) but you still need the redundancy just in case.

With your idea you will be using many cheaper pumps which will not be as reliable. Mind you their continuous operation will not be as critical because of the other components you will have installed to maintain water quality (which you haven't mentioned publicly in this context). However, those components will be critical so if something goes wrong with them your fish will be in trouble.

That is solvable but something you won't be able to get away from is the serious electrical inefficiency of single phase pond pumps. At a small scale this won't matter because you cant get small efficient 3 phase pumps. As soon as your total circulation rate goes over about 45m3 you should be able to get a small pump with an efficiency of around 50-60% which will be at least 50% cheaper to run than the pond pumps. Once you get ove 100m3/hr you can start to get 70-80% efficient pumps which will be much cheaper to run again. Since one of the major costs of running a system is your electrical bill or the depreciated capital investment in alternative energy solutions (after labour, feed and depreciation) this will make a big difference on your profitability.

Many commercial systems use float switches as alarm triggers. So a system could easily have quite a number (one per FT, sump, rotating filter, moving bed filter, others?).

The challenge is that such systems also have multiple ways of telling if something is going wrong. By measuring a range of related factors such as flow, level, temp and O2 means that even if multiple sensors/switches die the monitoring system still detects a problem and lets the operator know and switches on emergency measures.

With a design based on the drawing above such a multi layer approach will be expensive to implement on a system where the FTs are IBCs. On the other hand commercial AQ and HP system invest such massive amounts in monitoring and control because if something goes wrong it is catastrophic. In this case you might only lose one or four ibcs of fish. The losses from operational malfunctions may be cheaper than the control system of a standard commercial design. You would have to run the numbers to see.

Even if that did work out you still need a way to deal with the increased labour requirement of so many FTs.

I have a feeling the floats these guys are thinging of are the type you might see in a toilet, rather than the fully sealed type you see on most pumps, which i also agree would be unlikely to fail.

I know linking is a bad thing, but couldnt linking the FTs overcome a float switch / pump failure? - for the fish atleast.

Stuart,

I also enjoyed our conversation although I got chastised by my wife for interrupting too much. Please consider this an apology. I hope I wasn't too rude.I have a tendency to be nervous when meeting new people. I'm sure you will as you're a Gentleman.

The description of the system is for principal only, it makes no attempt to address the obvious short comings.

When I thought about implementation it was to a commercial application and redundancy and robustness were to be addressed appropriately to ensure viability. That is principally why I placed it here as commercial consideration are weighted differently than for a backyard operator.

The fact that the system requires modularity and multiplicity will make it unsuitable to most backyards. Whilst commercial operators should have the resources to address its shortfall. I myself saw the ease at which most of these issue can be addressed kept it well within the realm of commercial viability.

I had planned to use inexpensive parts as a way to install redundancy for my purposes. As an example, I would install two cheep pumps and switches per node.
Most well funded commercial designers would use reliability assured parts and systemic monitoring to address these issues.

It is my hope that this idea will help open AP to exploitation commercially on both a large and small scale. Backyardes will use what they can where they can as they see fit. As they should.

I was impressed with your insights yesterday and true to fashion you are right on the mark in your comments here. The issues are many but manageable and lets hope Australia can lead in addressing them. The issue this system addresses most pointedly is that of scale and scalability of AP systems in general or at least as I see them.

You appear to be SLOing to a ring manifold, for that to work rather small holes will have to be your manifold water exit points. I would worry about it as a fail point as the pipes fill with crud. Also after a while I would imagine that the time taken to fill the pump void will slow.

Ah yes, IBCs.

IBCs are the Volkswagen of the fish world.

They bring AP to the common man.

For this Earthbound deserves a noble prize for extreme humanity.

He promoted IBCs as FTs and GBs even though his own lively hood relied on the sale of poly fish tanks.

He may not have done it first but he brought it to the masses.

Sleepe,

This jpeg was to display the idea not the detail. I would not be using halos myself, halos work best/safest under pressure.

No apology necessary.

The design would work, there is no doubting that. But it can be done better and those designs that work are commonly what is used now and has for a long time now. I'm trying but I can't see an advantage of a system like this, even as a modular kit system. In its basic form there is 4 GB's, 4 FT's and 4 pumps. You could do the same without the floats so I see no value in it, but even better again you could achieve 4 GB's with 1 FT and 1 pump therefore reducing the flaws even further. I think it's a creative design and applaud you for that and really it comes down to how you want to set it up and no one can tell you otherwise.

Stuart ,
I absolutely agree in large commercial apps I see clearly the value in High performance high reliability and high efficiency pump.

Moreover, with appropriate control equipment you can lose the float switches and go to multiple moving tides to address the water exchange frequency issues.

Such built in reliability and control removes the need for the baki shower arrangement I envisioned for my lesser installations. The right system equipment simply removes the problem of tank water retention times.

These tank water retention times were a part of my original design using IBCs and baki's with the right equipment the sky's the limit on tank size and growbed size. To a certain degree it removes my hesitancy for employing other types of growing platforms.

The principal attribute of the system is modularity, scalability and with the right degree of sophistication increased platform range.

Back to the IBCs,

Such a large part of my interest in them was as an vehicle for moving fish stock into and out of temperature controlled grow out environments this wed me to IBCs. This does not preclude other options if they were viable.

When system size and sophistication allows I see value in tailoring the live stock in the GHs to the prevailing conditions. The idea of pumping or siphoning fish into transport tanks for conveyance to climate appropriate facilities is absolutely a goer and addresses my prime reason for being so attached to IBCs. It was is and will be an issue of having the funds available to bring the best solution without the compromises associated with my forced frugality.

I guess I'm saying if someone else is paying they will get the best system resources allow.