Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey guys, long time lurker. Figured I'd post my own (poor) attempt at an AP system after seeing all these great systems.

Some back history. I started my AP quest about 5-6 years ago with standard single IBC tote AP system. This worked great. I couldn't really expand on it as we were renting and being in CA, just didn't have that much land. Main problem was that sometimes we would come home and find the fish tank nearly empty from a clog somewhere in the system. Poor fish!!

Fast forward I now have my own house and finally caught the bug to redo the AP system. Even then, there were lots of periods of just pure laziness and procrastination. It was a labor of love, it just took awhile to get going and keep going!


Back in Dec of 2016, I started designing the AP system in sketchup. After all the measurements and mockups, I've decided on this system.



I would use parts of my old AP fish tank as an above ground sump. Being a very very lazy person, I really just didn't want to dig that hole. Above it would sit the growbeds and the tank will be in the back.

There will be two fish tanks. Standard 275 gal IBC totes I've had for like 2 years sitting in my backyard, just waiting to become something.


Construction begins on these growbed stands. There will be two.



For the fish tank, I opted to get heavy duty black tarp from Amazon instead of painting it (as painting it would require A LOT more effort, and well, laziness).

More work was done. Old bricks removed.




Sump tank was installed. The sacrificial white 55gal barrel was sacrificed to get all the measurements right (technically I messed up cutting it because!)




For the media shield, I opted to use Home Depot's 4" drain pipes instead of the normal PVC variety. Reason was, my home depot just didn't carry these large pipes in PVC form. They just had it in ABS and it was REALLY EXPENSIVE. Aside from being lazy, I'm also very cheap.

Time for growbed and tank piping and fun-ness.

Growbed:

I opted to use 3/4" pipes for the drain and 1/2" pipes for the overflow. Uniseals where used for the drains while poor-man's couplers (with cheap Amazon O-rings) were used for the overflow.

Tanks:

I used 1" inlet from the pumps and 1 1/4" (I think) outlet for the water to drain into the grow beds. 3/4" pipes used for the tank overflow back into the sump.




I couldn't find anything to use for the bottom gravel shields. So with my handy-dandy 3D-printer and CAD software (Onshape), I just rolled my own. All this stuff is posted on thingiverse (https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2360142) for anyone interested. This is what it looks like:



I used 1 1/2" pipe for the bell-siphon (always a fan of this versus the U-siphon).



More completed look:



As a side note, I use my 3D printer a lot for this project to fabricate parts I couldn't find readily available or to my liking. It was great fun designing the parts and making it work for the system. Everything was printed with ABS plastic for strength. For example this fitting to make my IBC tote drain adapt using standard PVC pipes. I'm sure such a thing existed, but it was faster for me to just design and print out then to hunt for it.

So far so good.

Things are coming along nicely.




Ready for media.



I used hydroton in the past I bought from home depot and still had a bunch left over. Washed those and put them in the bed. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough. Shipping for these costs more than the media itself. I found a local hydroponics guy that sold similar clay balls. Forgot what brand it was, but I really didn't like it nearly as much as the hydroton. The reason? THEY FLOAT!!?!? What?!?!

Floating media would churn the growbed and slowly bury the plants. Big time mistake!! Anyway, I ended up mixing them all together to mitigate the floating problem. One tank still had a problem as I didn't mix it well. I ended up having to mix in 20% gravel to stop it from floating. Very annoying, next time stick with hydroton.

Let me start off by saying: I love those cheap Home Depot wood lattices!!

One of the req for this AP was not to make it ugly as the wife may get cranky. The wood lattices were great!

Media is in and washed. I went to Walmart to get some plants to cycle the system. Got 1 Walmart Roman tomatoes, 1 walmart cherry tomatoes, 1 walmart black eggplant and 1 walmart cucumber plant. I pulled some old plants from defunct Mittleider's garden (this is a great system BTW! just too much maintenance and didn't work with my lazy lifestyle). These pulled (and washed) plants included "Taro-stem", "Bac Ha" or
elephant ear (http://www.bakergal.com/2014/04/bac-ha- ... o-eat.html). Its a leafy plant (you eat the stem NOT the leaf!) popular in Asian cooking. I also pulled cut off some of the family's favorite (and dying) pepper plants and shoved into the growbed. I also clipped a bunch of wild growing ong choi, a popular Asian plant that grows like a weed in AP, and shoved them into the growbeds too. These ong choi was the original from my old AP that somehow survived in buckets of gravel sitting on the side of my yard for 2-3years. Figured they deserve a new lease on life. Also bought some strawberries I put in little netipots from Amazon.

FISH!!

After about a week or so, I finally found a guy locally that sold Tilapia. He wanted to get rid of them (fingerlings) so I got them for a great price. Got about 100 to be split between the two tanks. He also threw in some water lettuce and duckweed.




Ended up throw the duckweed and water lettuce into the sump. It doesn't get much light in there, but figured the plants would help cycle and clean the water some more. Who knows. I didn't want to get rid of the water lettuce, they were pretty!

I needed a way to be able to work on and around the tanks. I also wanted to shade it and make it look for puuurty. One of the goals was to have climbing plants to craw around it and give it a natural look.

Time for more construction.




This provided a much nicer appearance to the tank openings and allowed me to stand on top etc.

More construction.






I really liked the way this looked and functioned. Wife thought it looked good too.

Phase 1 is complete. Need to take the boys to the pool, will post phase 2 afterwards

Wow for someone who is so cheap and lazy you've certainly done a great job, well done!

+1

Maybe you have slave laborers

Next part of all this fun came about as I realized I don't have enough grow beds/area for all the fish. I needed more grow space.

But first. Solar panels. I've had 4x100watt mono panels sitting around charging a bank of 2x125ah AGM deep cycle batteries. I've had this for over 3 years as a means to have emergency power in case of outage. I've always wanted to have an AP system completely separate from the grid. The whole "self-contained" sustainability thing.

Construction begins:



I ended up ripping out the lattice sitting on top of the tanks. I couldn't find any brackets that I liked to fit the panels on top of my system. Found some nice angled aluminum pieces from home depot, so I just fabricated my own. Some time later this became the result. Perfect angle to the sun too.



I ended up having to buy a bunch of new 12V DC pumps to run off of the batteries and panels. Ended up getting two of these: FORTRIC ZKWP09 Submersible 3 Phase DC 12V 750GPH Water Pump.

Let me just say, man this thing is POWERFUL. Much more than what I needed really. So I ended up splitting the output to both tanks, and saving the other as backup. It draws about 3.8A at 12V.

Next came some 12V DC aerators. These things draw about .5A at 12V. Bought 2x B15 Marine Metal aeration System from Amazon. One for each fish tank. This thing is run off of a timer. Its on for 400secs and off for 200secs. The pumps run from 6am->8pm then every 15mins overnight.

So far everything has been great and there's enough juice to feed to system. In case of cloudy days, I have the system attached to a 2A float charger too, just in case.

On to the grow-beds!

I've always really like pics of a million strawberry plants growing in net cups in a big PVC pipes. Seems like a very efficient way to use space. So with sketchup I came up with this.



So basically a bunch of grow space up top, and some extra space down bottom for whatever shaded light is left to have floating rafts and 2 tanks to grow duckweed. Otherwise it would have just been a waste of space.





This was the initial design. It actually didn't work out so well. With enough gravity assistance, the flow was just too slow, so it would over flow from PVC to PVC pipe. Additionally, I only used 3/4" pipes between the bottom grow tubs. This was not nearly enough. I redrilled to 1". Nope, not enough. Ended up using 1 1/2" pipes. This worked perfectly with room to grow. As for the top PVC pipes, I ended up having them all drain into the bottom tanks instead of zigzagging around. This worked out much much better.




Now I also wanted to put down some floating rafts. It was quite a struggle to find the recommended Dow "Blue Boards" here in SOCAL. Like everything else thats cool, it's extremely hard to get. I really don't know why. Maybe its a weather thing? Maybe it was found to cause cancer in 1 out of every million rats that was fed this stuff? Who knows. I did manage to find ONE roofing company that 1" 4'x8' boards. Hazzah!



So this is what I looks now.



Found some great plastic netting from HD to go on top. This helped with the shade as well as falling fruit and other garbage from my neighbor's tree.



With some leftover netting, I made covers for the fish tanks too.



I really love how this turned out. Much better than what I expected really. I had low expectations of myself, but love being pleasantly surprised when things work out!

Late one night I ended up watching some YT vids on duckweed and AP. Saw some guy using the floating rafts as a DW grow-bed inside the fish tank, but used screen netting to protect it from the fish. I did something similar.



Added them to the fish tanks and seeded them with some DW.



So now we're about caught up with my system. Pics taken from today.

Grow time of DW in the fishtank was about a 1.wks and the 2nd grow beds about 2wks.






I ended up putting a couple of feeder guppies into both the DW tanks. These little guys are cool! Great fun watching them.

Great job and soon perhaps you'll have many feeder guppies .

Everything has been growing great. Fish are around 3"+ now and very active. Plants growing well.



I guess these Elephant Ears plants like AP. Doing really well.



Of course Ong Choi grows like a damn weed. But good eating.



Walmart tomatoes and eggplant are doing really well. Cucumber too.




So ends phase 2. Very happy with the system. I find myself spending a lot of time outside just tending to it and staring at it every morning, afternoon and evening. Probably too much time really, but with a stressful job, it helps calm the nerves and keeps me sane!

So this is now the next phase of my project. Being an ex-software engineer, it was only a matter of time. I've been looking for an excuse to learn / program arduinos.

After about a week or 2 to playing around, ordering parts, and reading, I manage to get the following working: 2x thermometers (for outside and water temps), 4 relays tied to custom timer code (to control pumps, aerators, etc), pH meter for real time pH readings, and an ultrasonic water level meter. As soon as I get it all working with WiFi so I can view it from the comfort of my phone and desktop, I'll install it. Still waiting for parts to come in

Thanks guys! It was a lot of fun. Don't plan on feeding these guppies to the Tilapia though. Figure I'm rescuing them from being fed to something else. Is it me or are guppies ALWAYS hungry?