Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Tommies will take care of themselves. Cukes need an assist.

Hey guy's, it's been a while, I kinda dropped off due to many personal issues (aka divorce, and lost my house and thus my system location) but a lot has happened I re-married, have a newborn daughter and a new (old) home complete with an established pond full of Koi !!!
I am in the process of starting my new system from my old parts (minus the green house) and I will be rebuilding even larger over the next few weeks, I got my gravel sitting in the driveway getting washed by the rain as we speak!

Hope all is well with everyone,

-Stevo

Welcome back Stevo... sorry to hear about your tribulations... but delighted to hear you have your life back on track... and congrats on the new baby...

Sounds like things are starting anew for you all round... :cheer:

Welcome back!

got things up and running, didn't go larger just made due with what I had as you can see...


pond has around 2 dozen small-medium koi and goldfish







finally got everything working last weekend and started planting ( need to get some more ) also need to re size the drain pipe as it's way too small.

Did some more work had to tidy up a bit after resizing the drains



supply and return



finished planting the beds last weekend and everything is growing nicely special thanks to my varmint detering electric fence


I reconfigured these beds into one auto siphon, still needs some tweeking with the overflow piping.



-Stevo

I see you've changed the original loop siphons... not sure how the new configuration works...

It appears that it's a single PVC "loop" siphon...

The drainage from the tubs looks very small.... what happens if they all drain at once??

Rupert, my loop siphons worked ok in the greenhouse but now that I'm outside I've been having problems with small leaves and debris clogging the tubes( I should really screen the tops of the access pipes). My loop configuration didn't have enough drop to create good suction and sometimes the beds would overflow. so I decided wanted to treat all 5 beds as 1 by connecting them all at the drain level to help equalize the water levels between them and have a more powerful siphon action in the process.
This setup is working much better than before, but you are right my drains are still on the small side and I think I may need to address that to avoid any more problems.
I am going to keep a close eye on things for the next few days to see if it keeps working consistently.


-Stevo

Time to start all over again...we had a bad winter and lost all my fish because my de-icer crapped out.

Nice looking system. Love the natural look of the pond. With your winters though, snow and ice are gonna be difficult to deal with. No plans for a greenhouse?

Good to see you back Artisitc... bummer about the fish...

Onward and upward mate...

TheNative-my first set up was in a green house (check closer to the start of this thread) I was rather proud of that configuration, even with all the challenges. This winter was the worst we've had in like 15 years, everything would have been fine if the heater didn't stop working (I didn't lose any fish last year). I'd like to do a green house again I just haven't figured out where it should go.

Rupert-yeah it stinks, but now I will re-stock with a poly culture of edible fish instead of koi and goldfish. Just have to figure what has the best growth rate and ease of feeding, I'm thinking catfish, bluegill and possibly some trout because those are all common in my location. I've estimated the pond to be around 1600 gallons. but I'm only using about 340 gallons of growbed which I may increase this year.

first things first I need to solve my groundhog and deer problem. they pretty much destroyed everything last season even with the electric fence. persistent buggers.