Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I think I need to change out my sump tank. I think it is leaking. After I plumbed the 200 gallon IBC in to my system I can no longer use it as my top off water reservoir, so I moved two 40 gallon aquariums out to the greenhouse and placed them under beds. I used about 60 gallons of water in a week out of those two 40 gallon aquariums... I have to be leaking someplace, more than just the occasional splashing and evaporation.

Right now I am just using a plastic tote as my sump tank. They aren't really strong enough to hold water long term, so I am thinking I will have to shut the system down long enough to remove the sump/pump and dig out the hole bigger so I can fit a 40 gallon breeder tank down there as my sump tank instead. The tank just barely fits under the bed next to my sump and doesn't give me enough room to reach in it so I wouldn't be able to get the pump and plumbing back into the tank if I don't dig down farther. I'm hoping that is my only problem is that the sump tank has a leak in it (it seems like the weakest point of my system).

Then I think I am going to change my supply lines to my beds. I currently have 2" PVC for everything, and the only thing I have shutoff valves on is the raft bed because it is on the same supply line as the gravel bed and is downturned, so if I didn't have a shutoff on the raft bed the gravel bed would never get water. The gravel bed, hydroton bed, and lava rock bed all have a 2" PVC pipe which is upturned so I can just adjust the angle to control the flow between different beds. I think I'm going to cut the 2" PVC where my lines turn to go to each bed and drop it down to 1" PVC then put a shutoff valve on each bed instead to control the flow to each bed (2" shutoff valves are just HUGE and take up so much space, plus SO much more expensive!), then I'll just plumb the beds to have the PVC pointed down slightly below the media level to reduce the splashing.

here is a dive video from this morning... same lake as we dove last weekend...

Plumbers of the aquaponic kind unite

Lovin your dive videos.

I have several more that I've finished editing, I haven't uploaded them yet because we have a dive party tomorrow night so didn't want to show anyone before the party. I'll upload them later this week and share some more when I do.

I changed my sump tank last weekend, now using a 40 breeder fish tank instead of a 27 gallon tote. I also changed out two of my beds to drop down to 1" with a shutoff valve for the supply instead of the 2" upturned pipe for supply... doing that made it more difficult to adjust the flow to the other beds, so I bought the parts to change my other beds to 1" supplies with shutoff valves as well. I'll make that change this weekend. While I was changing out the supply lines I found two spots that I apparently forgot to glue the PVC supply line together... there was a small drip there, so I fixed that and glued them, but I am still losing quite a bit of water on a daily basis. I'm guessing about 8 gallons a day that are going someplace (I set the water level so it was at the bottom of one of my drain pipes in the sump... in one day it dropped almost 3 inches x 36 x 18 for the tank size / 231 = about 8 gallons lost in a day)... which is still close to 60 gallons a week that I noted before. I will have to look for other signs of leaks and see if I can figure out where the water is going (it seems like a lot of water for evaporation...)

Oh, I also swapped my DC9000 pump that was in the greenhouse with my DC12000 pump that was on my 240 fish tank in the house.

I took some power readings for both pumps to compare the energy usage / savings by making this swap, so I just put the data in these charts together for comparison...

This table shows the energy usage of both pumps (DC9000, DCT12000) at their variable speeds and their rated flow rate at those speeds. The yellow highlights is what I had been using on my 240 gallon aquarium in my house, the green is the greenhouse system (referenced as "300 gal" in other tables.. referring to the main tank size)


Previously I had the DC9000 in the greenhouse (because I stole it from inside the house when I started the aquaponics system, later I bought the DCT12000 but put it on my tank in the house because I didn't want to shut down the AP system to make the conversion (lazy).

So my greenhouse was running the DC9000 at maximum speed consuming 72W/hr and my indoor aquarium was running the DCT12000 on the minimum speed consuming 22W/hr.

After making the change the greenhouse is running the DCT12000 on setting #8 which consumes 67W/hr and the indoor aquarium is running the DC9000 on the lowest setting consumes 18W/hr.

The flow rates (at estimated head - I have not actually measured this) I'm estimating the greenhouse is about 12ft head, whereas the indoor aquarium as about 6ft head.



The previous setup the greenhouse was probably running about 370 gal/hour, with the new setup it is probably running about 671 gal/hour, so that took me from 1.2 to 2.2 turnovers per hour (very rough estimate)

The indoor aquarium was running about 606 gal/hour and is now running about 792 gal/hour so took me from about 2.5 turns to 3.3 turns per hour on that aquarium.

So overall by spending an hour (or less) redoing my pumps for these two systems I've increased the flow of both systems and decreased the energy usage of both systems to save me about 6.5 kWh / month (only about $0.82 savings... damn that's disapointing... where the heck is all my energy usage coming from... need to start tracking that down because my bill is $220-240 per month...)

Not too much savings in money. That would be nicer if it was more!


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Looking at this data, I could drop my DCT12000 down to flow setting 4 instead of 8, which would save me 29.5W/hr and still increase my flow rate from 1.2 times per hour that it was to 1.3 times per hour, which would bump me up to 27.7kWh / month savings ($3.51 a month) with no negative impact to my flow rate that I was getting (theoretically)... maybe I'll still do that and see if it makes a difference.

My other thought is to put my pump on a timer. I could run it for 30 on 30 off to cut my usage in half. I would need to bump my flow setting up to 9 in order to maintain the same turnover of the fish tank every hour, but it would still save me 27.3kWh/month with theoretically no impact to the health of my fish (I already run air in my tanks, so shouldn't have a huge impact on DO I wouldn't think...)

My beds wouldn't be affected much because they are constant flood, so there would still be water in the beds all the time... the NOT-NFT would be the only thing that would really be impacted because it wouldn't have any water flowing through... any thoughts on the impact of that? Maybe I'll post it on the NOT-NFT thread and get some feedback over there.

actually I am not sure why I would run it on a timer when it would save me slightly less power... I'll just drop it down to setting 4 instead of 8.

OK I have too many questions... I wonder if by switching to a timer on my pump would reduce the amount of evaporation I have? So I would increase the flow rate but cut the amount of time the pump is running in half... would standing water evaporate slower than flowing water? I think it would, but I'm not sure if it would be offset by the increased rate the rest of the time that the pump is running?

I would be more worried about creating a situation of depleted O2 in your FTs if you went to a timer.

I don't know if you already have aeration going or not and how that factors into power consumption?

Adam

yes I have one of these that I split the flow in to two tanks then have a second one in my DWC (SWC I guess now by definition since it's not 10" deep)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002J ... UTF8&psc=1

They say they are 18W so not a huge draw. Was talking to the wife last night, I am going to start plugging everything in to the Kill-a-watt and see what is drawing so much power.

Here are the rest of my videos from this summer...

Last night was another full home grown/raised meal. Pork roast, red potatoes and sauteed zucchini



Today is day two of nearly nonstop rain. I dumped two inches out of the rain gauge yesterday and we are back up to 3.5 inches right now. After no rain all summer it decided to hit us on the weekend forcing us to stay inside.

To make the best of the time yesterday we made 30 pints and 5 quarts of applesauce that we canned. Then I cleaned out most of the peppers in the garden and sliced them to make 10 half pints and 5 pints of sliced hot peppers. Today was move all of the food into the big freezer so we can defrost the little freezer for it's annual dethaw before we put more venison in it. So we updated our inventory of what's in the freezer while we were moving it all in to one.

I bought four led light fixtures today to try adding some supplemental lights in the greenhouse. They might not add much PAR, I will probably get some t5ho or MH lights to supplement for the winter, but if nothing else these will help be able to see what I'm doing in the greenhouse anyways.

No added light


Added 4 ft led fixture


No added lights but had my existing lights in the greenhouse on


Added lights, I realized I didn't have the rest of the greenhouse lights on so the near side of the tomato plants look darker.