Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello everyone , so i have invested all my savings in buying a rundown fishing and diving resort in Fiji. Fantastic you say, and maybe. This has given me the drive to eventually go completely closed loop as possible, solar PV, water heating etc etc. Aquaponics is something i have discovered in my research and i am hooked. I can read and research much myself from the most excellent articles that abound and wish eventually to supply as much vegetables, fish and fruit as possible to the guests.

So i'm looking for some advice regarding my 'plan'. All food waste will go into a machine that runs for 24 hours and use natural enzymes to break down the food into a nutrious thick powder. The goldfish i saw at an expo would eat it happily and i'm hope tilapia would do the same, what do you think? We will have a bottle crusher that crushes to the size of small pebbles and we have an abundance of coconut fibre so i'm thinking of using the glass as a bottom layer that the water level would run at and allowing the coconut fibre to wick the water up to the plants. The pumps would be ran directly from the panels via battery and charge controller and i'd have led lights running at night.

Any obvious problems, or is it worth trying? small scale to begin with before i cut to pieces the 3 x 10,000L leaking water tanks to use as fish tanks?

With appreciation

Lance

Hi and welcome.

Regarding cutting your tank. It will become weaker when cut. Can you repair them?

Can you post more details about your plans?

what are the tanks made from?

Crushed glass has been used as a growing medium before but I'm thinking the coconut fibre would clog up?

do you have grid power available?

Do you have a link to the waste processor, sounds awesome. but bear in mind the fish will need a specific diet.

Hey Lance.... This sounds like an awesome project on many levels. If you're not comfortable/ready with giving out info here, I'd love a PM with more info on your resort. Diving in Fiji is on my bucket list and someday (if I can swing it), it would be great to have a place in mind.

Pictures of the leaking tanks would be good. Tanks should be fairly easy to repair.

For the group: "bear in mind the fish will need a specific diet".
Is that really much of a concern? Are you talking missing micro nutrients or something of greater concern?

While it has nothing to do with aquaponics, photos of your whole project would be awesome and go a long way towards allowing us to live vicariously through your dream! *sigh...*

Best of luck!

Rob

Good luck with you business but I personally wouldn't use broken glass in my system because of the possibility of the small particles flying around in the water

With a design and operating method that hasn't been done before yes start small. With a new business I imagine you would have plenty of other things to sort out and get the hang of.

Hi guys,

Thank you very much for your replies. I have no issues with giving out any information on this amazing project. I'm also very happy to make a complete mess of it and learn as we go along as its a long term project that will benefit everyone. To begin, the 3 tanks are plastic, potable grade, and the split is halfway so if i could cut a third and bind with steel wire on the outside for support it would give me around 10,000 litres of water for the fish to play in. Regarding fish, tilapia are available in Fiji and i'd love to see how mussels, shrimp, clams and crayfish would cope. More skill in making that happen methinks. I'm happy with the various types of pump mechanisms and have seen some remarkable examples online.

To answer a few more questions, no there is no grid. I'm planning on building a 70kw solar array with 220 panels to avoid using the diesel generators with 150kwh batteries for night use. I was asked about a link about the food processor machine http://www.ecosys.com.hk. I will have to see if the fish die after eating it but certainly the ones i saw like it! Regarding the coconut fibre, i was going to install a fine mesh system to stop any pump clogging up so would probably incorporate a sump so easier to clean.

Regarding some other comments, the bottle machine uses an imploder and grinder so there are no sharp edges, its more like pebbles. With a few extra machines its can be ground very finely to be used as aggregate in concrete, much better than our beautiful white sand!

To those who want to visit Fiji to go diving or fishing, GO, nicer people you will never meet. As someone else mentioned, opening a new business involves a lot of work so i'll close the resort for a few months. 1st March 2015 is my planned reopen date and i want everything done by then. Lots of work yes, but as someone else said it is the dream, commercial self sufficiency, good prices to guests minimal effect on the environment. Very happy to PM anyone on this or please PM me.

Lance

So guys back to my big question. If i set the drain at the level of the top of the glass with coconut fibre above it do you think it would work. If so how much depth of fibre would you recommend. I should also say the water supply comes from a bore hole and then passes through a commercial RO system so is fairly pure. I may need to soak the coconuts in water first to reduce the salt and to soften the fibre to remove it, then the water can go back through the RO system again!

Apologies if you followed the link to the food machine as it's in chinese. I always use google translate to change the chinese pages and it does a pretty good job.

Lance

I can help a bit with the solar end. Use LED grow lights. Batteries are expensive. If you are putting some money into it use Capacitor batteries as they will last longer. Batteries are your real cost in this and not sustainable. I would suggest caps. Solar should be able to charge them during the day along with running LED grow lights. Depending on your fish i would suggest staying away from power consuming devices such as heaters if you can. Keep the pump(s) to a minimum. Let gravity do most of the work.

Hi Kendal,

Yeah i plan to use DC LED fluorescent grow lights. The batteries are there to power the whole resort so a bunch of LED lights won't consume much in the scheme of things, that also applies to the dc pumps that run direct from the batteries. Water temperature not an issue, i haven't needed to wear a wetsuit when diving , minimum recorded temp ever was 18 degrees centigrade and little deviation throughout the year. That said i was going to devote a few 310W panels via a charge controller to look after the whole thing to avoid wiring issues and inverting unneccessarily. Normally i'd run the batteries at 48V but with such low power for the lights and pumps i'll go with 12 or 24v directly. This will be fun