Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My 1st aquaponics system
I learned about aquaponics a couple of weeks ago and I have been read about it and decided I can make something small that can fit in my kitchen. I have had most of the stuff already to put the system together. For my system it consists of:

https://goo.gl/photos/Rcs64NpaECo2eLAs9
10 gallon fish tank
Rubbermaid 10 gallon tub
3 tier wire shelf
¾” bell siphon
Water pump
Fish tank decorations
Grow median: Clay Pebbles

I have some more work to get it all up and running, but I think it will make a nice herb garden for my kitchen. Any comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

welcome to the forum.

always hard to do a small indoor system. Keeping to things like herbs etc is a good idea.
Try and get the grow bed close to a window with lots of natural light.

water fluctuations may be an issue with a siphon and the relatively small fish tank so you may be better off with keeping it to simple constant flood or else partial F&D.

What type of fish are you looking at ?

although you are 1:1 FT to Grow bed volume I suspect you will struggle with fish generating enough waste for the 10 Gal tub. That would mean that you may have to supplement feed your veg with a watering can.


here is a tip for adding images into your posts viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21754 just need them to be less than 900x900.

The siphon is 4" tall and the sides of the container are 8 1/2" tall. With testing the siphon it emptied about half of the fish tank but I have no grow medium in the grow bed. Would it be safe to say that I would only use about a 1/4" of the water from the tank?

For fish I was thinking of just using gold fish, something the kids can look at and help feed. Would there be a better fish for my setup?

I was thinking that the fish tank was going to be to small when I started putting it together, but I was trying to do it cheap and just use what I had on hand

I have a question, my cycle rate 2:1 meaning it takes about 2 minutes to fill and a minute to drain. Is it filling and draining to fast or will this rate be ok for growing a few herbs?

those rates are pretty fast - running a siphon is probably doing very little for you in a system like that.
You are getting a big rush of water outgoing and a big pulse of water. back in
with that sort of rate solids would be sucked out of the beds.
you really want your siphons to drain about every 15-20 minutes (4 times per hour)

you would be better just running a gentle system with water passing through and good aeration.
water needs to stay in the grow bed for a little bit of time for the bacteria to access the ammonia and for filtering to occur. So if your pump flow is too fast you lose this benefit.

as noted previously the water fluctuation will be an issue - depending on your media aggregate size it will be around 1/3 of the volume of the grow bed. You can test it with a bucket anyway.

you would be better off just running the water gently through the grow bed under a constant flood with perhaps a partial drain with the pump off. So a classic timer flood and drain scenario that leaves your grow bed around 50% filled. Put a tap in the grow bed so you can drain it every now and again.

divert some of the excess flow back in to the fish tank for aeration.

-------------------------

what is the flow rate of the pump ? (test it with a container).
and what are the respective volumes of your fish tank and grow bed.
you really don't want to pump more than about about 3-5 fish tank volumes an hour, and can get by with less..

I may have miscalculated but with minutes to fill a 10 Gallon tub your numbers suggest around 1.5-2 Gallons per minute... (90-120 Gal per hour). That is too much for a 10 Gal tub and is more suited to a 40-50Gal tub.

+1

Darren may have some evidence I don't know about but personally I think the cycle timing doesn't matter that much as long as there is adequate aeration. Your system may flush solids out more than most but siphon systems aren't really known for holding as many solids as other system types. Diverting back to the fish tank might be wise, just in case but if you can't do this without messing up the siphons kicking in, just try it the way it is and I'll bet it works .

My siphon is 4" tall and it goes back to the fish tank. I was using it to help aerate the tank. The tub is 8.5" tall filled with 5" of the expanded clay pebbles. I lowered the pump flow rate as low as I can, it now takes almost 3 minutes to fill and 1 minute to drain. If I leave my flow rate at the 3 minutes and 1 minute should keep it cycling constantly or have it on a timer for on during day and off at night?

>> Darren may have some evidence I don't know about but personally I think the cycle timing doesn't matter that much as long as there is adequate aeration.

not really Scotty but I know that the R&D from places like Hawaii suggest that a siphon dump every 15-20 minutes is optimum (and that is what appears in most guidelines as well).

the issue of having too fast a flow rate is that the nitrification at some point becomes inefficient.
I am working on the presumption that a dump every 4-5 mins (12 dumps per hour) being a bit too much.
Plus that system is going to be so nutrient limited that effort will need to be made to keep the solids and any additives in the grow bed for the plants.


[Itsthedeave] you will get your aeration just by putting a T in the pipe and diverting astream of water from about 3cm or so (1-1.5") above the water and directing it downwards. This would enable you to drop your flow rate to around half or one third. Run as a constant flood the system will be fine. Uisng a timer is fine too.

The siphon is optional and will make very little positive difference to your situation for plants.
If anything as Scotty notes your will struggle to keep solids in the grow beds to break down with such an active siphon - the only nutrients your plants will get will come from the solids breaking down. If you add anything to the plants (which you will need to do I suspect) it will not hang around the roots very long. No evidence but I suspect that is not optimum for the plants.

Interesting Darren. I don't know if those in Hawaii have tried reducing the flow or stopping the flow at intervals. One of the reasons why the conversion efficiency might be affected is the inability of bacteria to attach to the media. Giving them a chance to attach might be enough to gain some processing ability and slowing or stopping the flow could be all it would take. I'm not sure what's involved in binding the ammonia or nitrites in order for the conversion to take place but often this sort of thing is very rapid.

Fascinating discussion