Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi Everyone.

I'm looking to build up a 15m x 5m shade house and I have so far come up with 2 possible designs, and I'm wondering if i'm on the right track.

I run a diving operation in Indonesia, so I have quite a few skilled staff who will help out with the build.

We go straight from shore front to hillside so flat land is of an extreme premium, but if someone has a good idea to use the hill to our advantage i'd be open to ideas.

Firstly, Equipment available here:

500, 1000, 2000, 3500 litre water tanks made from plastic (cost circa US$120 per 1,000 litres)
200litre Blue chemical drums (dirty, would need a good clean) ~$30
Concrete - We can make ourselves with waterproofing, just made a swimming pool so the technique is still fresh.
Fiberglass - Can make ourselves for repetitive items.
Mini-Excavator to dig and maneuver equipment.
Talapia

Environmental Factors:
Extremely hot weather (35C+ most days)
Iron rich water (may be good, i guess?) pH 7.4 ~3000ppm out of the well, after treatment 1680ppm.
Close to the sea, saline spray.

I have hydroponically grown lettuce without bolting by using shade net and a fan so I think i can manage to do it if I am smart with the design.

Design 1: NFT Tubes, DWC beds and herb towers:

In this design I would hide the fish ponds under the NFT tubes running down the centre of the shade house, the fish tanks would be ~1000 litres each and we could put 6 of them in there and not have all of them in operation all the time. Then we would have a DWC system at either end which the nft's flow into. Towers would be powered from a secondary pump in the DWC bed and trickle back into the system at a convenient point. DWC's would be in house designed fibre or concrete tanks.

In this system, my fish tanks are my sump. Is this still OK? The filters and mineralisation areas would be outside the shade house higher up than the nft / dwc system so there would only be a need for one pump.

Having the fish tanks dug into the ground makes me worry for piping / cleaning. If I use an airflow to make a vacuum to a skimmer (not familiar with the abbreviation for that system) I believe i'd need a sump to be even lower than the fish tanks - how much lower? This might get disturbed by high tide

Would I be better concreting in one long tank underneath the NFT's with a sloping bottom to collect all the crap at one side?

Design 2: DWC priority, with some towers and NFT tubes around the side.

DWC scares me a bit for the amount of mosquitos we have here. Hence this is at #2. I figure i'd stock the DWC tanks with Neon Tetras and Guppies to try to combat them. If I go this route i'd have to house the fish tanks and filtration outside in another shack, which may get tricky for level space. I like and loathe this idea in equal measure. Or do I have my ratio of beds / fish wrong? Could I get it all in one 5 x 15m tent?

Im comfortable with NFT, but I see very few people using it for Aquaponics so I wonder if i've still got small town thinking on that one.

Before I moved to the tropics I bred Koi, so not worried about looking after the fish so much, and comfortable with the growing... Just mixing the 2 together is a bit of a stress as I haven't started yet.

I need to brush up on fluid dynamics for the piping, so any help there would be appreciated. And plans for MT.

I do not have any gravel beds in the system as I can only get granite gravel here and it's super heavy so would be awful to clean. Should I consider some gravel filtration beds?

Howdy and welcome to the forum. This sounds like a spectacular project. I believe hillside aquaponics can work just fine. My beds are much higher than the FT and ST. Pump the water up with an appropriate size pump and let it gravity feed back down. I do wish my filters were lower though. At issue is the impeller of the pump will pulverize the fish solids making filtering more difficult. You want the fish waste to make it to the filters with gravity if possible. Gravity feed is gentler. I need an air lift to get the fish waste off the bottom of my tank. This lends itself to the possibility that the FT can be emptied if there is a water pump failure. I don't really know if having the filters lower would prevent accidents or not. I just did it that way and dealt with it. It works and I'm happy it does.

Thanks for the tips. With this in mind, I'm looking for approximate appropriate heights for x,y,z n the attached diagram.. Or pointers to where I could calculate it or just a general rule of thumb.





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Picture doesn't fit on my screen. Ca't see the right side. I can see you've got a mineraization tank inline. I haven't read here where that's done. It is a nice idea, but I think the consensus is it works slowly so they keep them off-line. I hope the people who have them chime in, because I could be wrong.

Ah ok, I'll make smaller. Them mineralization is offline, but plumbed in if that makes sense.. I don't fancy using buckets every day!


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Here's 2 smaller pictures. My main concern if if the height differential is enough to get good flow, but I think I can enhance that with some air flow if required. I fly back home tomorrow so can start digging on Tuesday, hopefully!


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I hear ya on the buckets of poo.

Well, I committed.

We should finish a retaining wall for the shade house today, and yesterday we got 2 boat loads of tanks for the system. Hopefully this afternoon I can grade up the land and start the dwc tanks next week.

Here's boat load #1:






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Have you considered cutting the bottom of one of those tanks, turning it upside down and using it for the filter? The taper may work well for solid collection.

Today we finished off the grading and had a big fire to clean up all the old wood that has collected over the years... And made the first few coats of fiber on the swirl filter mould we fabricated yesterday. It's white on inside and the coats tomorrow will be blue. Yes we are aware it looks like a giant *butterflies*!

This will be about 200 litres. So far we have 9000l of fish tanks, so im thinking to make up 2 swirls and split the fish tanks into 2 sets.

On each set of swirls there will be 2 x 200l blue drums (ex phosphoric acid which I think is ok) with bio balls then pot scrubbers. The swirls will dump the crud into a 550l MT. It's cheaper for me to use 200l trash cans so may fibre reinforce those rather than drums if I can't find 'safe' ones.




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Oh and fish... Blue Tilapia or Red Nile? We feed our 45 staff fish everyday so I'd love reduce our footprint on that. So, 45 hand sized whole fish... Or grow bigger and cut them up. If I can serve it one day a week I'd be happy to begin with. I would have to prove to them that the big ones won't taste like mud though...


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Pumps and electrical up next.

3 x Resun LP100 (140lpm). 1 for MT, 1 for 2 DWC, 1 for most of the FT.
1 x Resun AC 003 (65lpm). Additional for FT.

I went for LP as I got the feeling they were more efficient, and I got spare diaphragms at the same time.

Pump.. I went in water as its in the sump. Atman HA25 -100w, 25000l qmax. I may add a HA20 on a bakki filter once I've tried the pump and only run it at night when we don't use much power (24hr genset)

I also have 2 Herifi ZS008 grow lights which finally made their way thru customs. These were planned for my existing hydro setup but I'll be able to use them for seedlings and boosting light at 3am - 8am as we are under a hillside and don't get much morning sun.


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