Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi Newbie here. I'm building my first system and would appreciate any improvements on my design that you may have.



The system combines four of the IBC tanks in a larger tank using 150mm pipes (not sure if this will work?).

I've tried to keep the system as simple as possible and any ideas to make it even simpler would be great.

Ideas to keep the costs down and pitfalls to avoid would be great.

Thank you in advance.

It's fine. But 5-6 beds for vegetables are good with one tank.
What is the idea of 4?
The number of fish is determined by the size of the vegetable beds.

150mm is overkill for joining the tanks together 90 or 100mm will do the job and be cheaper for both the pipe and the fittings.

Make sure your tanks are on a very sturdy foundation. Tanks and growbeds are heavy, any movement in the ground under them, especially common when the ground is wet, will lead to stressed joins between your tanks.

Bulkhead fittings are expensive compared to uniseals

You may want a way of controlling flow on the return from your RFF to the fish tank, and where your feed to the RFF t's off to the fry tank.

An alternative would be to run from the pump up to the RFF but down just above the tank T off to to a tank return to provide aeration and control the flow throug the RFF, this would need only one valve.

You'll need to stock according to your growbed volume, don't go mad with filling all those tanks with fish

Thank you SeanD for the great info. I'm going to modify my design based on the info provided. I struggled to understand what this part of your post meant, please could you clarify - thanks.