Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi All,

So after years of dreaming and planning and months of scrounging I have finally built my aquaponics system, and since the members of this forum have been the source of most of my inspiration and ideas I thought the least I could do was put up a few pics. My system is in the northern suburbs of Darwin.

Last week I took the week off work and cleared the "jungle" behind the shed (including several rampant bougainvilleas and an ancient frangipani) to make room for my new 3000L tank from a local supplier.

The tank was promptly cut in two pieces - with the bottom becoming a ~2000L fish tank and the remainder as a ~1000L Sump, for the IBC grow beds to drain into.



I then had to level out the area for the tanks and GB's and compact and retain footings for the GB's that will withstand a torrential downpour and saturated soils over the wet - fingers crossed I have done enough....






Next I plumbed her all in and assembled the autosiphons, before carting a cube of gravel (20mm granite from the local quarry at Mt Bundy) to fill my grow beds...



After running the system for a week (while back at work...) I decided it was time to chuck in some plants... started slowly for now - just some cherry tomatoes, capsicums, cucumbers and climbing spinach.



Will plant some more leafy greens over the weekend - but for now its time to put my feet up and have a beer with my best mate.




Over the coming weeks I need to - track down some fish (!!), and plant out some more as well as set up my air pump, backup power system, vertical grow beds (for strawbs and herbs) as well a DWC bed for seedlings / lettuce and some half barrel tanks for redclaw and cherabin. Besides this I am also still trying to work out what I can do to keep the wet season rain from flushing out all my nutrient and deciding whether I need to erect some shade...

A shout out to Gwydion and Myst for the help and the inspiration!

Cheers!

Looks good, make sure you cycle the water well, i was to impatient and lost lots of fingerling because of ammonia and nitrite spikes.

The idea with cutting the tank is nice, did you tell the manufacturer that you don't want any holes in it or how did you sell the rain water inlet at the top?

Redclaw and cherubin need lots of space, i read somewhere 1m2 each, i had 25 odd cherubin in my sump and they started fighting and killing each other, so they ended up in the pot very quickly. And i had 2 red claws in the second sump but they were both female from memory, so one killed the other and the last one died for reasons unknown.

Make sure you have access to the underground pipe work, so you can run a rag on a steel wire through every now and than because the water velocity in big pipes goes down and the sediments will settle over time.
I answer on the other questions inn your pm per pm.

Good luck with running the system and hope you will have big harvests.

Hey Gwydion -cheers for the response!

Yeah it will be nice and cycled before I finally get my hands on some barra at my current rate of progress. But to speed up the process I have been adding seasol, charlie carp, compost tea, as well as a few buckets of water and sludge from a well established pond. I'm hoping to get some nice freshwater creek critters in there too in the next few weeks.

Any other advice for getting it kicking along?

I asked the tank manufacturer (terracorp in Yarrawonga - where you got your grow beds) to patch the breather hole in the top - so they welded it up for me.

Maybe I will have to rethink my freshwater crustacean ambitions - I was hoping that I could just provide them with heaps of hides made from pvc pipe off cuts to keep them happy. Maybe I'll just fill my sump with jade perch instead.

As for cleaning (pigging) the drains, I have put screw caps on both ends, and I'm hoping I can easily float a line down through the buried pipe and pull through a bunch of rags. It's not buried real deep anyway, just enough to have a clear walkway.

I've got my fingers crossed for bountiful harvests too - otherwise my name will be mud and I'll be sleeping with the blue heeler...

Cheers,

Simon.

Ha Ha know the feeling.

Seasol is good for the roots of the plants but contains nearly no ammonia/nitrate, doesn't help much with cycling but gets your plants going. I used that as well until i found the msds to see the compositing. Charlie carp / seasol power feed is better for that use.

Be careful with wild caught fish, i have done that once, danger is when you get 1 fish with white spot disease it can kill your whole system and you have to wash all the gravel with bleach/chlorine and start again. I was hoping to go and net some bait fish every so often but my Barra weren't even interested in the live fish and when i installed the new sump i found a black Bream in it with nearly 200mm length.

When i started i got a piece of bio filter from aqua green out of his quarantine section to make sure it's not infectious but i think the normal cycling wasnt speed up by it.

Thanks Gwydion - that's all great advice!

Today I added my auto top up / water aging system - which is just a blue barrel with an airstone in it, which gravity feeds to a float valve in the sump. It will get topped up each morning when the retic comes on and demand feed the sump to counteract evaporation... Hopefully the vigorous aeration is enough to drive off most of the chlorine before it enters the system...

Also nearly finished a dodgy lid for my fish tank from some (non-treated) pine pallets that I scabbed. I'm not sure how long it will last before it rots up here, but it should keep to missus off my back (and the sun off the water) for a few months at least. Any advice what I can coat it with to make it last a bit longer in the elements? I don't really have the budget to coat it with a good marine varnish, which is what I would like to do...

Also mounted a waterproof enclosure for all my electrics and a waterproof housing that my airpump (Hakko 25L diaphragm pump) sits in. This should provide me with a ridiculous quantity of air for my FT, sump, aging tank and the couple of half barrels i'm planning for redclaw and cherabin. I still have to tidy the cables up a bit, but it should keep me out of trouble if we get some (more) early rain.

That's pretty much it for now - except that my system is starting to cycle, with nitrite and nitrate levels coming up and ammonia dropping. Now to track down some feed and fish to populate my tank!

Was thinking of starting with 20 Jades from http://www.ausnativefish.com.au as an early light stocking and then moving them to the sump when I get my barra (maybe 30 -50) when the local hatchery does a run in late November. Any thoughts?