Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'm trying to get started with building my first system. My plan is to do a barrelponics setup but use a 100 gallon stock tank instead of a barrel as a fish tank. I know that I need four 1/2 barrel growbeds (twice as many as typical barrelponics). Do I need to size up the flood tank (or whatever it's called)? I am planning on growing rainbow trout (only edible fish I can find locally) and lettuce (and maybe other veggies). Is it best for me to build/buy a greenhouse or make "coldframes" to go over the tank & growbeds? Where can I buy a decent pump? Does the pump have to have twice the capacity of pump barrelponics manual requests? I am so excited to begin construction!!!

Hey LF, I am using a single 340GPH fountain pump ($40 from Lowe's) to service 100 gallons of gravel, in four 25 gallon Sterilite storage tubs (Walmart) with loop siphons in them, which would be very similar to what you're talking about size-wise. The pump is almost too much flow, but it's hanging on the edge OK.

Maybe you could skip the flood tank and just use a siphon on each bed, that would be less water out of the tank than using the flood tank anyway, I think. That would be about 25 gallons out of the tank on average, or 50 gallons max at rare times because the beds would usually be out of sync. Get a valve to bypass some of the flow to the beds in case the siphons need less flow to cut off properly.

See:
http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/vie ... 8276#78276