Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thankfullly, the wife sold all of this years goslings just last weekend. We have 3 females and end up with tons of eggs/goslings each year. I'll ping you to let you know when we have another batch. You can feel free to drive up here and take a few home. They are the best watchdogs. Nothing comes onto the farm without the geese investigating / alerting.

We lost a few fish due to them jumping out, so I built a cover to keep the little buggers contained.

3/4 PVC frame with home made hinges.

Accomplished today:

- Harvested the remaining spinach and radishes from the large grow bed.
- Planted romaine lettuce seeds
- Added a new grow bed
- Planted peas in the new bed

For this grow bed, it's 2/3 of a 35 galon barrel cut lengthwise.
I placed the drain in one end, horizontal 2" off the bottom. Instead of using a stand pipe / siphon, I decided to build the siphon on the outside.

It certainly starts and stops more quickly than my other siphons.

Unfortunately, I can't expand to add any more beds until I add a larger sump. I need to find another IBC for a decent price.
The new bed on the blue barrel stand.


All 4 grow beds.


The external siphon. Works so well.

I like the external siphon. Reminds me of when I put in the pump on the 850 gal fish tank. I lifted the water up 6 feet and then piped it to my beds. I had the pump going to test and then shut it off. I then went to bed. In the morning I returned to an empty fish tank... luckily this was before I had put fish in:) The piping created a siphon off the pump... LOL. I raised the bed inlet, which stopped this issue.

You may want to put your bed feed tubes down into the medium. Not sure how much light you get, but your tubes and medium will begin to grow algae. If the feeders go directly under the medium, algae is not an issue, unless you water floods above the medium.

We are moving... selling the farm in Elma and buying a new farm in Olympia. This year we planted the outside garden and the aquaponics on the same day. Today my tomatoes and califlower outside still look as if they are just starting, but in the aquaponic beds, I have massive tomato plants and huge califlower plants going.

Please make sure your pictures are no more than 800 pixels wide.

Today is a sad day.

While I was at work, someone accidentally shut off the power to our pump and air pump.

100% loss of all fish.

Our casualty counts were as follows:
3 that were dropped and damaged during the transfer into the big tank.
10 jumped out over the course of 2 weeks (They all jumped out through a tiny gap between our temporary cover and the back of the tank)
17 died due to suffocation.

I really need to put the air pump on a UPS. At least the plants all appear to still be doing alright.

Yet another lesson learned.

Dang sorry for your loss TS, trout can't handle power loss at all, zero buffer there.

Figured it was time for an update.

Since I'm currently fish-less, I figured this would be a great time to perform the expansion.
I managed to obtain 3 additional IBCs for a good deal.

So, here's the distribution of the new tanks.

1st - IBC replacing my fish tank. I just cut a hole in the top of this one for larger water capacity.

2nd - Cut in half lengthwise (A verticle cut just on either size of the valve) for two larger grow beds.

3rd - Cut 16 inches off the top for an additional grow bed. Bottom to be used as one sump.

The old fish tank has also been re-purposed as a sump.

So, that's

1000L fish tank
2 - 750L sump tanks
4 - 250L grow beds (IBC cuttings)
3 - round 1/3 barrels
1 - 1/2 barrel cut lengthwise
1 - 55G blue barrel for a sump

That's pretty close to 3500L.

So far, all of the new tanks are cleaned and cut. The new fish tank is installed with the old water transferred, and adjusted plumbing in place and tested.

Next up is to re-locate the barrel grow beds to the other side of the greenshouse, and place/plumb in the new sumps.

Once the new sumps are in place, install the 3 new big beds.

I'm thinking turning one of the sumps into a floating raft bed as well.

I believe that this should help keep the temperature of the water more stable for the trout once we decide to bring them back in.

I am guessing that it will probably take around 3 weeks or so for all of the new water to cycle and become stable enough to add the fish back. I may throw a couple of dozen feeder goldfish in the tank until we pick up more trout.

Pictures to come soon. Thanks for reading my ramblings.

Sorry to hear about your fish losses, but glad to see it hasn't deterred you at all

So, with the loss of all of our trout, we needed a way to continue to sustain all of the plants. My lovely wife's parents are snow birds. Meaning, for 6 months of the year they travel to a warmer part of the country, then travel back up north for the summer months. Unfortunately, that means they land here on our property.

Once we had the first batch of trout in the system, they would enter the greenhouse while I was at work to watch the fish. One of them shut off the pump and air bubbler on accident. This, of course killed the fish.

I was discussing options with my wife on how to prevent this from happening again. Part of the plan included adding additional sump, larger tank and other expansions. I'd also mentioned grabbing a mess of feeder goldfish to throw into the tank until we could travel to get more trout.

One day, I came home from work and found that the tank was stocked with 300 tiny feeder goldfish. They were so small, they would go through the protective screening I'd installed on all of the outlets and end up taking a hydro-tube ride into the grow beds. Anyways... my wife came up with a new name for the goldfish. She started calling them Guilt Fish. It was such a fitting name.

Our system has been running on guilt fish for the past couple of months.

Yesterday, I took two of my sons for a trip to pick up some trout from a local fishery. It ended up being one of the most cool experiences we've had yet to date. The fishery was about an hour north east of us near Oso, Washington, which is an area that was damaged severely in March by a massive landslide.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide. The folks that run the fishery lost their son and his fiance to the slide.

Anyways... The property is on the side of a good sized mountain. They have a good sized creek and natural springs that start right on the property. The fishery is built into the side of the mountain, using all natural materials that they scavenged from the land. Stone tanks and channels for the fish and breeding ponds. All water is diverted from either the creek or from the springs and is gravity fed everywhere. Extremely impressive. They raise and sell over 200K fish each year. They supply both Rainbow and Cutthroat trout. As a general principal, they do not allow the public onto their property at all due to some unruly people a few years back. They invited us to come up and take a look around. We ended up spending over two hours hiking around the steep slopes investigating all of the different fish runs and learning about their practices. It was awesome. My sons fed the entire rainbow trout side of the farm for them. It's thrilling feeding thousands of fish in a pond.

The owners allowed us to take some pictures of the farm, but asked that we not post them anywhere. I certainly wish we could have. It was an absolutely striking place to visit. We all learned a tremendous amount of knowledge of the trout. One thing I did not know was that the cutthroat trout are able to live comfortably in much warmer water than rainbow trout. Next year, once we have harvested our rainbows, we'll pick up some cutthroats to raise during the warmer summer months.

So, we ended up coming home with 47 9-10 inch naturally bred rainbows, which now reside in our main tank.

Additionally, we brought home one 27 inch brood trout. We have named him Macha after the "Monster" in the old Caveman movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveman_(film)

You can see him swimming in one of our sump tanks with a couple of buddies. He is so huge!

We've been quite busy with the upgrade of the system, harvesting for the year and planting winter crops.

I did add a much more energy efficient pump (Laguna Maxflow) which is working exceptionally well, along with a heavy duty commercial grade bubbler that only uses 15 watts. Currently, I have it driving 4 large stones in the main fish tank and one in the sump that contains Macha the big trout.

The bubbler is plugged into a 1500W APC UPS. That way, if the power does go out, or we end up with in-laws that "accidentally" shut off the power to the pump, the fish will not suffer the same result as before.

Currently, we're planted in the greenhouse with:
Tomatoes
Celery
Beets
Radishes
Broccoli
Green onions

Next on the list will be to add some supplemental lighting for the long, dreary Seattle winter days. I'm still investigating what types of lights will produce the most results most efficiently for our purposes. A couple of the local hydro shops have been helping educate me on our options.

That visit to the fishery sounds awesome. It is a shame that a couple of unruly people ruined the option of more people visiting.