Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

360 litre wheelie bin-shaped fish tank behind the bamboo screen at the back. 80 l DWC on the left, 5 X 70 litre ECGM grow beds. CHIFT-PIST.



After fishless cycling (which took ages). 11 baby silvers installed.



Hydroponic strawbs which are now delivering the goods.

Here's the fruits of 23 years' hard work then. Not shown is a "decoupled" system with a 240l tank and 11 buckets for tomatoes and pumpkins using water from the FT and my indoor tropical FT plus additives once I know what to add. Still working out how best to run that system, so all ears for any advice.

Welcome to the forum JU22 . Neat looking system . Are the clay planters lined somehow?

A very neat and tidy system!

I too am intrigued by your grow beds. Are they clay pots that have been modified?

The clay pots aren't lined. Opinion is divided on whether the algae growing on the outside is cool or looks crap, ha ha. Interestingly, it pretty much gets washed away by heavy rain.

I drilled out the existing holes in the pots that I got from Bunningziziziz and gunked the blazes out of them. They only leak slightly, ha ha. A bit smaller than I'd like. A wiser man might have built a long wooden growbed more like my dwc.

Great looking system even in small backyards you can have a nice operating system

Yeah great looking system in a lovely courtyard, well done.
I can't see where the inlets to the grow beds are, could you run us through the system?

Yes, but I like the idea of converting pots that we already have into AP. This may get me over the line with my wife when it comes to adding a bit of growing space to mine!

Thanks for the kind words Sean, Skeggly, F&F and Scotty.

Yeah Sean, I was also having to work with the chief of staff in mind. Avoiding visible plastic ups the cost of an AP system a fair bit, though. Better that you have the pots already. In my case the Bunningzzz shareholders threw a party.

I wonder if something like Hypertufa would work for a nice planter. I think you could mold in the holes for the AP connections as you made the planter (haven't tried doing this so just throwing this out for some adventurous soul ).

Hmm, OK, bad idea, Hypertufa is porous - maybe it could be sealed or the mix could be changed .

The sump is about 160 litres. (I don't know exactly because it was the biggest hole I could dig without hitting conduits or big rocks, so it's not a regular shape.) The sump is just in front of the fish tank under the furthest gb. The inlets are towards one end under each gb. They have a short standpipe with a net hat under the top of the ECGM (This was probably a mistake: should have had longer standpipes. Will replace them some day).

The bit of bamboo on the sump tank is to (partially) hide the floating pvc pipe water level gauge. The bamboo in the gb's is to hide the pvc siphon tops. The media guard slides over the siphon when needed to save space in the gb.

A T-piece above the pump sends water left to the FT and right to the GBs. The pimp is a 90 dollar cheapie, but low wattage and allowed the money to be spent on a decent air pump (plus another cheapie for backup).

The inlet line runs along underneath, with the drain line higher up against the fence and some elbows from the gb's to provide the siphon.

Water for the DWC comes off the inlet line and out the other end to the sump.

I have no filtration of any kind. When the fish get bigger I'll hopefully have built a sand bed for extra biofilter and planting space.

what pump are you using to get the head for your vertical tubes ?

Just the industry standard HP pump on a timer. I think they cost about 80 bucks. It's high wattage, but only runs for four minutes a day. More than enough head out of it. In fact the next step is to get a seconds timer, because a minute is too much water, even at about 3.7 m minus the water depth in the tank.