Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi all,

I saw the spot on Gardening Australia which lead me to Joel's site, which in turn lead me here. I'm fascinated by the aquaponics concept and have been well and truly bitten by the bug.

I have my "bible" on order from Joel, can't wait for that (ordered it last week so my fingers are crossed it will get to me soon) and have been lurking here for the past week or so checking out all of your excellent systems and ideas.

Of course, I had to get my hands a bit dirty too so I decided to see what I could do with my poor goldfish pond out the back. I've had the pond in there for 6 months or so, it started life looking very nice and clean with nice new plants. Time, 35 odd goldfish, and a little too much sunlight caused it to resemble pea soup, what plants that were left were covered with algae and the water smelled very stinky (obviously full of nutrients).

So I wheeled my old BBQ in place as a stand, and dug around in the shed for as much hardware as I could find (having recently built this place I had quite a lot of handy stuff). Then I hopped in the car and drove to that evil 'B' place to get the rest of the stuff I needed. I reckon I have spent at least a few thousand bucks there over the past year just finishing the house off...! I also stopped in at a hydroponic shop to get my substrate (expanded clay - pricey but light, and this is just a small test system so one 50l bag was enough), and tubing and pump.

As you can see from the photos, the pond water is pumped directly to the top of the two towers, which are placed in two grow beds (plastic tubs). These drain via the (convoluted) drainage tubing at the bottom into my yabby tubs (4 yabbies per tub for now), and then back into the fish pond. The reason for the multiple drainage holes is that originally there were two holes at the same height but they whistled and gurgled and made a heap of noise, plus I found that the holes were too high and the grow beds had too much water sitting in them. The current config works quite well, it is nearly silent and I can control the level of drainage from the bottom hole, so on a hot day I can leave the water in the grow beds for longer by closing the valve some more.

In one week the water in my pond has gone from pea soup to looking like drinkable water, the smell is 95% gone, and you can see the fish. The fish must also be able to see each other, and they must like what they see, because they have been rooting like mad the past couple of days. I've grabbed one of the plants and put it in a bucket with the hope of getting some hatchlings. The yabbies must be happy too because two of them have moulted, must be stretching out a bit after being confined to a small tank in the pet shop with 40 odd mates.

Growing in the beds are herbs, lettuce, broccolli, snow peas, I also have an interest in Australian native plants, my entire garden is natives, so that will be the next thing I will try. May be challenging because most natives don't like high phosphorus levels.

Anyhow, sorry for the rant, check out the eye candy below and let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

Cheers,

Simon

S77 (i love these short hand names, pitty i just chose a plain old name )

Anyway! Welcome and thanx for the pictures.

Its really good to have a blow by blow comparison of your pond. So are you convinced yet?

A suggestion? If you haven't already hooked up one of the "auto-syphons" that we've been chatting about lately then i'd do it.

Looks like you regulated the water flow in / out by the valves?

My first desktop system used this method. It leave NO room for blockages, put it that way

Thanks for sharing

Steve

Nice pics Simmo, living fish, living plants, something must be working.
Big Mick

Amazing stuff

From pea soup to coplulation in no time. It's all good!

Monya

Yep, the valves do the trick nicely but I will look into the auto-syphon more.... It's funny tho, the more I read and think and am inspired by what everyone else is doing, the more I am tempted to modify and add to the system and play some more.

The next one is already coming together nicely in my head, just have to get a sparky round to get my power sorted outside.

I must remember to order pea soup at the restaurant next time I take my better half out for a meal!

Great job Simon, you might want to have a look at some of the towers we have constructed.

I wasthinking that too Johnnie, gonna see if Heather wil cook up a brew!!

I've been through and had a look at them and like the idea of cutting and heat moulding the PVC, my girlfriend got a snazzy new hairdryer for her birthday yesterday, and its sitting behind me on the table right now just itching to be used.

Am I game though? If she notices its been used she will kill me... hah ha

might be better for your "health" to use a $30 paint stripping hot air gun

OK another update for you all...



As you can see, I decided to add another growbed for the spare seedlings I had left (in the left foreground - snow peas, tomotoes and red capsicum and chilli) because my pump still had plently of spare oomph. I could probably add another 1 or 2 more beds in this flood and drain config if I really wanted as it is still being tapered back considerably by valves.

I have run out of substrate though and don't want to cough up another $50 at the moment, and I have only got small yabbies and goldies feeding the plants. Besides, this system is messy enough as it is, and I don't want to go too crazy, better to leave some money and enthusiasm for the next project.

I now have 45-50 goldies at last count and 8 yabbies, I went to the pet shop and bought a few more of both yesterday seeing as I calculated they are living in roughly 500L of water with the pond + the two tubs.




The new grown bed (tub) utilises flood and drain (like the other two beds) with an auto-syphon, it fills to just below the rim of the pots in the tub before the syphon kicks in and (almost) empties the tub back into the pond. I have put a small stand-pipe in the tub also to stop it getting clogged. I had a minor disaster last night with the drain getting blocked by a stray clay ball and it caused the tub to fill and all of the balls to float out of the pots (one of the problems I have found with clay balls so far IMO). I had to remove the wire mesh, remove all the pots and refill them, then replant all the seedlings. Thankfully I learnt my lesson while I was there watching the system, I could have emptied half my pond if I hadn't been there. I have subsequently added drilled PVC pipe filters (which are similar to the standpipe pictured but smaller) to the drains inside the red and blue grown tubs.

The auto-syphon on the new bed was the first one I have played with, it achieved a syphon within 3 minutes of the pump cycle starting and just needed some adjustment of the height of the top of the loop to ensure the pots were watered up to the root level.

Now... Syphons are a very frustrating thing to get just right, I must have tried a hundred different positions and sizes of loops and right angles and top and bottom heights of the loop and etc etc. I think you need to be a piping engineer to fully understand what is going on but I noticed that in my experimentation there were two main factors:

The amount of downforce or pressure (for want of the proper physics terms) that the water in the bed exerts in relation to the level of the top of the loop in the syphon is the key to getting it started, but it is also relative to the diameter of the syphon (and other factors like the rate of flow into the tub). If the weight of the water in the grow bed is not "heavy" enough to push all the air out of the tube the syphon will never start and will just leak (dribble). My red tub consistently filled with water and the balls and seedlings were floating up 10-15cm before syphon was achieved, even though the top of the loop was lower than the level of the gravel by about 5cm. Lowering and tightening the loop helped make it more reliable, but it still needs some tinkering.

The key to breaking the syphon is ensuring that the flow into the bed is less than the flow out of the syphon, this allows the bed to empty itself (eventually), air gets introduced into the syphon tube, and the process starts again.

Phew - hope I explained myself properly, I might go speak with one of my engineer mates and see if they know anything about it.



The initial shape of the syphon was as the picture below, but after MUCH experimentation I found that the shape of the loop didn't matter that much, in fact the smooth loop (as above in the final config) seems more reliable.



They are working reliably now (until I check again in the morning that is ) but it has taken at least 6 hours worth of testing.




I probably won't modify this system much more, but have it running on a timer so I will be watching it closely over the next couple of days to ensure the flood/drain cycle works reliably.

Picked up 3 x 160L poly tubs from the evil "B" shop ($35 each and very sturdy) that will make either a complete small system or possibly grow beds for a (yet to be sourced) larger pond.

Cheers,

Simmo

Very pretty fish, Simmo. The siphon work is very interesting, thanks for sharing your experiments!

nice setup simmo.

are you using anything for heating?

do you have much room out there? if not aquaponics is perfect.

is your system under a patio? do the plants get much direct sunlight?

good work

SO how many fish did you have at the start, be careful with dumping in too many to quickly.............

Nope no heating, even though I live in Atwell which is one of the colder suburbs in Perth (you can usually subtract 2 deg from the nightly minimum for Perth), but goldies are pretty hardy and unless the pond freezes they should be OK. The pond is dug into the ground and gets direct midday sunshine too, so the temp probably isn't too bad for them. Feels bloody cold to stick your hand in there first thing in the morning though... The yabbies (in the two white tubs beside the bbq) are pretty much the same as the goldies with their temperature tolerance. (aren't they...?)

There were initially around 35 - 40 goldies in the pond, swimming around in ~350-370L of pea soup (wish I had taken some before photos of that), and not one of them has died due to poor conditions or disease. The next door neighbors cat got a couple of them, caught the bastard sitting there right next to the pond eyeing them off one morning, and found one on the lawn that (I assume) the cat fished out then decided against eating it. I had a quiet word to the neighbor, and put the fear of god into the cat by sneaking up on it with my dog Sam and then skitching him at it, so I haven't seen it around since.

So I have added another 10 goldies as of Thursday morning, and counted them again tonight at around 42-43 total. Plus the 8 yabbies which have an additional 280L of water in their tubs, so its around 650L all up. The goldies are around 5cm each, and the yabbies are all small ($1.60 ea) under 10cm long head to tail. Do you think my stocking density is OK?

Its just a test system for the moment so it's not that aesthetically pleasing (different coloured tubs on an old bbq held together by string, tape and cable ties). The whole system takes up maybe 5m2 of my patio space, but its around the side of my house and not in the way of anything, so it can stay there for a while. Its undercover, but aligned such that the sun shines on the growbebs for most of the middle of the day.

I am sourcing components for my next system now, which will be a little larger and located out in the back yard (as opposed to the side of the house). The pond will be dug in next to the my shed and on it's Southern side, so it will enjoy shade for most of the day. The growbeds will be up against my fence on the SW boundary of the yard next to it, so these will face roughly north and get a fair amount of sunshine. But... thats another story, have made a couple of additions today so will post these tomorrow.

When I do get my next aqua system running the fishpond will stay there, but I will simplify it down and remove the bbq and all of the tubs and make a permanent (but smaller) grown bed/s that fit in with my patio design. That way I can leave the pond as a simple aquaponic system with just herbs for example, and still have the added benefit of the filtration/nutrient removal, so the pond will stay nice and clean.

"Where's that cat, Sam...?"