Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This is going to be a spectacular setup

A bit of excitement today with the pressure side of the plumbing completed. That Laguna flows really well with 40mm pipe and 45 deg bends. After this beer I'll start on the gravity feed to the grow beds. Woot!

Holy crap, you do get a lot more flow with the 40mm pipe. I learn something new everyday here! Thanks everyone

Can you come and build our AP system!?!

Lol! Thanks for putting together such a detailed system thread! We are partially burying 2 IBCs as sump tanks so all your details were really relevant and informative!

I love your solution for accessing the pump!

Also - the Poly fish tank looks awesome. I wonder if I can achieve the welding of the 50mm poly pipe around the top myself... (We are looking at purchasing a 3,000L poly tank and cutting it in half to make 2 fish tanks.

Greenhouse is a thing of beauty. Very professional looking!

Hi SydneyChick, thanks for the encouragement. I hope you can re-use and even improve on some of my ideas - which were mostly cobbled together from other solutions on this forum!

Apparently the problem with polyethelene is that it's very hard to get anything to stick to it. Even plastic welding the stuff is difficult with various grades or mixtures being used and proper equipment and experience required. Hence why I left it to the pros. Speak to the guys at Melbourne RotoMould and they should be able to put you in touch with a store in Sydney.

Quick update... last weekend I hired a trencher for a day and knocked over 3 different jobs on our property, one of them being the 600mm pit for mains power to the greenhouse. The sparky will finish off the wiring tomorrow, which is the last major piece of the puzzle. Getting close to ordering those river stones...

wow. thanks for the great pictures and video. That is a very nice setup.

dang! Do you live on a beach? I hit solid rock one shovel down. I guess that's why they are called the Rocky Mountains, eh?

Is your float switch a piggyback switch or did you hardware it in? Also what size connections did you use for connecting your sump tanks? (We are doing exactly the same - two semi-buried IBCs as sump pits.)

I opted for piggyback, mainly for flexibility if I ever need to use the pump somewhere else.

For the IBC connections I purchased two of the adapters below which convert the course "buttress" thread on the IBC outlet to 2" (50mm) BSP, a common type of thread for irrigation and plumbing fittings. You join those together with a 50mm BSP male-male coupling. There's a photo of mine near the bottom of page 2. Also - some IBCs have a fine thread and you'll need a different adapter, so check that first.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/1000-Ltr-IBC-Tank-Adaptor-to-2-BSP-female-/280716056562

There's a trick to screwing it all together, as when you tighten one side it unscrews the other. I put one IBC on its side with the outlet pointing upwards and balanced the other IBC on top, so the outlets were facing each other. With a helping hand you then rotate the top tank clockwise (parallel to the ground), which tightens the threads on both sides. It's critical that you keep the top tank perpendicular to the bottom one, to avoid cross-threading and to avoid cracking the plastic. Good luck!

Thanks so much for the tips! May I ask where you bought your float switch? eBay does not appear to have much...

Too easy! I bought the $59 unit with piggyback plug from the guys below. Works a treat.

http://www.creativepumps.com.au/work/float_switches/luise/luise_float_switches.htm

I'm after a bit of help with pipe sizing. The 5 beds below are fed by a 50mm DWV pipe from the FT, which is filled at roughly 5000lph. So each GB should receive about 1000lph, so they will need to be drained roughly 8 times per hour - based on 125L water in a 300L grow bed, to be safe.

I have a 100mm media guard in each bed (shown below, no slots yet), and draining through a 25mm tank fitting into a common 50mm DWV pipe which will feed into the blue barrel, which is my remote siphon.

Further below is my remote siphon which will have a 40mm stand pipe made from pressure pipe. The top of this siphon will set the maximum flood height of the grow beds, which will flood or drain together with the blue barrel all at the same time.

You can see the 40mm tank fitting, elbow and socket that will drain back to the sump tank. The 50mm inlet from the GBs hasn't been plumbed yet. I'll have a 100mm bell inside the barrel with a break pipe which extends to below the bottom level of the grow beds so that they full drain, similar to the Olomana Gardens Barrel Siphon (look it up on youtube). Due to the tank fitting inside the GBs they won't actually drain all the way but I understand that will assist with solids mineralisation.

My question is... will the 40mm siphon drain fast enough? It's the same internal diameter as the pressurised pipe from sump to FT. But it needs to drain 5x 300L growbeds at least 8 times per hour.

I have a couple of 50mm DWV uniseals arriving today so I can upgrade the siphon drain to 50mm if I need to.

Thought I'd show how I cut the drainage slots in my 100mm gravel guards. Not rocket science and doesn't need to be millimetre perfect, but a $130 cold drop saw makes the job a lot easier and is also a great alternative to cutting lengths with the old hacksaw. Just allow roughly 4mm of pipe to be vapourised on contact and make sure you don't breathe it in!

Nice. looks way easier then drilling hundreds of holes. might have to get me one of them.

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

It took an entire day to wash 1.5 cubic metres of 20mm "natural charm" river pebbles. Looking at my 300L grow beds, some quick maths tells me that they were about 150L short on the delivery. Grrrr.