Gettin' t̶h̶e̶ b̶a̶n̶d̶ my aquaponics back together

I've finally started working on my aquaponics again. It's been on the ground in a flower bed. It shifts and sinks. Nothing stays level. Now it's on a concrete slab in the barn. South facing, so some sun is available. The IBC totes I was gonna cut the bottoms off of for grow beds are now gonna be fish tanks. So I'll have to figure out what to do for grow beds. I'm open to suggestions. I'm considering building a wooden frame and putting in some pond liner. (Anyone know where to get pond liner, or how to choose pond liner? Maybe where to get a remnant? What the going price is?)



The first two tanks are set up. I salvaged as much of the old water as possible because it's already nitrogen cycled. The one on the left has the nine goldfish that survived, plus fifteen addd last Thursday. Gonna add every two weeks or so until I reach capacity. The right tank is for koi. I hope to add the first ones tommorrow. I'd like to run everything off of one pump, so I connected the two tanks. First I connected the valves. One of my connectors has a 2" output, but the other is hose thread. I used a hose. It didn't level fast enough, my pump outran it. I put the pump output back into the same tank as the input overnight. Today I built a siphon bridge out of 2" PVC. Now I can pump out of one tank and into the other and it levels just fine.



I also put the pump in a bucket with two bulkheads. One is the output. It is plumbed straight from the pump outlet. I put a hose fitting on the outside of it so I can output to the other tank with a garden hose. The other bulkhead I put 1½" PVC to just below the water's surface, where I put on a tee and stuck my filter floss (quilt batting) in it. Now the pump is also the filter.

Get some more IBC's

John C Daley wrote:Get some more IBC's

I have one more that holds water. Hoping to use it for crawdads (yabbies?) and duckweed. Also hoping the crawdads stay on the bottom and don't kill my duckweed.

Still haven't decided what I wanna do about grow beds, but it's high time I get plants in the system. I put in my first raft for Deep Water Culture today.



Then I put some cuttings in it: Rose, tomato, comfrey, lamb's quarter, bamboo and the last piece of pothos my mother-in-law's cats failed to kill.



I don't know if you can grow bamboo from cuttings, but I saw a guy do it on youtube, and it wasn't 5-minute crafts, so it's worth a shot. I think he said to be sure to cut a limb (That's the new "trunk".) And be sure to keep the node attached. (I guess that's where the roots will develop.) So that's how I did it.

Added the third tote today.



It has a hole where I had a bulkhead. I either need to figure out how to patch it, or put a bulkhead (and a threaded plug) back in it.



Finished drilling the rafts. (None for the middle bed. It's for duckweed.

I think for most people IBC totes are the best and easiest way to build a system.
unfortunately for me when and where  i built my system meant I had to make wooden frames, which i then lined with Plywood and 1" foam insulation.
with the cost of building materials now doing it this way would be excessively expensive. your basic 2x4 8ft is $12 here in Ohio and a sheet of 1/2" ply about $50
i bought my pond liner off ebay. a 25' x25' liner set me back $175. but my system has 1 tank 12'x5' x3' and the other 10'x4'x3'.
the larger tank has Tilapia, and the smaller Trout
the biggest issue i have at the moment is  keeping the trout tank cool. and i'll have to find some way to keep the tilapia tank heated in the winter, night time will be the biggest problem.
keeping the trout cool was easily overcome by adding an overflow and using the hose pipe for a few hours. The overflow goes to the vegies outside. so the water and nutrients from the fish aren't waisted.
what type of filter system are you using.?

Please keep us posted, there arnt many posts from people and their Aquaponics systems.

all the best  Phil Grady

I took some more cuttings and put them in the second bed. Mulberry and wild grape.



My filtration right now is through my circulation pump. It's just a cheap submersible from harbor freight. There was no way to attach anything to the inlet. So I put it in a bucket. I used one bulkhead for an inlet, adapted to 1½" PVC. At the top of that, where I can reach it, there's a tee with some quilt batting inside. Most of the water to the pump has to pass through the batting to get in. (A little can flow in where the cord enters.) I put in a second bulkhead and plumbed it to the pump outlet. I adapted it to hose thread so I can direct to any tank I choose. (Water returns to the first tank via siphon bridge.) I've always found this type of filter more than adequate, but this year I've doubled the amount of water. (Soon to be triple.) I hope this will be enough, but time will tell.



The tee is just like this one, and in this orientation. (When I change my filter media, I rinse out the old one and put it in this tee until the next day.)



Here's the dirty media next too the clean one.

I've integrated the middle tank and stocked it with wild gathered duckweed and crawdads.



I've also picked out a growbed that I think will hold up, so that should be installed soon.

Got my first grow bed (for the new system) set up. IAVS style, and well supported this time! I'm finally happy with the overflow and how it drains, so I hope to start planting. I put a little fabric over the drain holes in the bed and around the overflow pipe. Started with denim, but it wouldn't drain well enough. Twenty five minutes after the pump shut off, I could still see standing water above the sand. Replaced the denim with the quilt batting I use as filter floss. Now the water drains out of sight below the sand surface in around four minutes.

Aquaponics update:

I can't seem to keep koi alive. I'm down to one. Until I figure out something to change, I won't be buying any more. Seems cruel and wastful to keep buying $6 and $9 fish to feed 'em for a week or two, then fertilize a sand bed with 'em. Mr (or Ms) koi may be getting some roomies from the gas station that sells minnows.

Duckweed prodction is going great. I scoop out a little almost everyday and it fills back in. It looked a little thin yesterday, so I skipped today. I've put a little in with my red wigglers, but I mostly dry it and put it in a bucket. Hopefully it will one day be the protein element in some chicken feed. If that doesn't come together, it'll be fertilizer or worm chow.

The red wigglers are mostly in here:




A handful have been put in this bucket and the manure pile.





I started out with drying the duckweed in a couple old strainers.


Since then I've built a little dryer so I can dry more at a time.




A scrap of foam keeps birds and bugs out of it and makes it a shelf I keep my fish food on.


When I foraged my duckweed, there was another plant along with it. I've forgotten what it is, I had to look it up at the time. The internet described it as not harmful for my use case, though folks seem to hate it in fishing or swimming ponds. I think it looks kinda cool. If it ever becomes a problem, I figure I can surely eliminate it from a three hundred gallon tank with a footprint the size of a pallet.


Okay, so I have an (possibly hair-brained) idea: I wanted to use one pump for three totes and a growbed.


Counting from left to right, the pump is in tank one. It wasn't convenient to use rigid pipe, nor to cut a hose. So I adapted the pump to be able to screw a hose onto it. There's a lot of slack laying behind the tanks before it runs into the grow bed. (The grow bed empties into tank three. From there, the water levels via the two siphon bridges between the tanks.) If I were to bury the hose(s) how deep would I have to go (and how spread out would the hose have to be) to use anualized thermal inertia to prevent freezing? I'm sure if I buried a hose full of water three feet deep it wouldn't freeze, but that doesn't take into account extracting the heat from the ground and using the three tanks to radiate it into the ether. Could the math work out on this, hopefully without needing a backhoe, or is it a pipe dream?

I also have a physics dilemma: siphon bridges in the winter. Will they break? The tank water will freeze at the surface first, and the siphon bridges extend below that, so maybe the water in the siphon will be able to expand safely. If the siphon water freezes before the tank surface, again it expands safely. I only anticipate trouble if the tank surface and the part of the siphon adjacent to it freeze at the same time. What do you folks think?

And finally, I noticed the last growbed picture I showed was just sand. Now it's full of moderately happy growies. Growth isn't spectacular, but with an iAVS system like this, growth improves over time as nutrients and organic matter accumulate. The little trench that drains the water is getting green and crusty, which is a good thing.

I got a question: bamboo is TALL, how can it grow on a raft? wouldn't it overturn it?
Thanks.

Fizpok Pak wrote:I got a question: bamboo is TALL, how can it grow on a raft? wouldn't it overturn it?
Thanks.

It didn't take. If it had, I'd have transplanted it to the ground or a pot.

My last koi surprised me this week. (I was assuming he'd died. I hadn't seen him since fall.) Got him some buddies now. The smaller fish in the foreground are feeder goldfish, about ½ grown. The koi was about that size, maybe twice that size when I got him.

While surfing the forums I came across this one and it caught my attention. I've been doing aquaponics for about seven years and have been in my current location for almost six. The first year I used a 275 gallon IBC tote set up with a flood and drain bell siphon. This thing worked great I grew cabbage mustard and tomatoes with on inputs but floating catfish food for the bream and catfish that came from a nearby pond. The first winter it was in service the grow bed froze solid it had four cabbages growing in it at the time. I had to turn the pump off and let the whole thing thaw out. To my surprise the cabbage did fine and was eaten a few weeks later.
When we move to this place the tank and fish came right along with us. It has since then been replaced with a donated cattle tank that leaked pretty bad. I used roofing tar to seal every seam in the thing and it has been leak proof since then.

For some reason I could not load more than one picture at a time, I think the file size was too large.
This is how it is set up now  the second one had a 110 volt pump that needed a inverter that killed my battery on a regular basis. This one uses a very small, very efficient 12 VDC pump that has been going now for about two month solid without problems, other than sucking us a bit of pine straw on occasion. The setup has changed slightly over the last few months. The PV panels are way overkill. But I had them so I'll use them. The sheet metal that they are sitting on helps with algae growing in the water and helps keep it cooler as well. The old tank is sitting off to the left side and is serving as a duckweed/tadpole/... grow tank.
The little pump fills the two grow beds three times in an hour. Each of these beds is about eleven cubic feet. If I did the math right that's right at 500 gallons an hour. The tank holds 750 gallons so it is cycling once every hour and a half? The bed on the right has expanded clay from the local concrete plant the other has generic hydroton.

T Melville wrote:My last koi surprised me this week. (I was assuming he'd died. I hadn't seen him since fall.)

She had to explain it to me*, but a friend said I should name it "Harry: the koi who lived".

*(I'm not a fan of the movies.)

T Melville wrote:I also have a physics dilemma: siphon bridges in the winter. Will they break? The tank water will freeze at the surface first, and the siphon bridges extend below that, so maybe the water in the siphon will be able to expand safely. If the siphon water freezes before the tank surface, again it expands safely. I only anticipate trouble if the tank surface and the part of the siphon adjacent to it freeze at the same time. What do you folks think?

I don't know if it will always be like this, but the bridges didn't break and they stayed primed.

Aquaponics season again. I'm just breaking into selling at the farmer's market. I plan to get a nursery license. You know what would be super cool? Lots of little comfrey plants that I can pull up and bring along a decent amount of root. Hope this works. Get to work, fish!



This is from digging up one clump. Most of the plants in the background have at least a little bit of root. They had more, but it's comfrey. Any root thick and rigid enough to break by hand, and long enough to break at least an inch, are planted in the foreground.

Hey T!
I love the thread, especially the direction your taking towards nursery work.
The cuttings in the floating rafts, did they work?

I also wanted to ask about the sandponics bed.
It seems like a great system, and one that could work well for cuttings .
Are there composting worms in your sand bed to deal with breaking down the detritus?
Do you think a sand bed with redwrigglers could deal with breaking down duckweed?

William Bronson wrote:The cuttings in the floating rafts, did they work?

Mostly no. I don't think I have enough fish waste. Also I was trying to root a lot of things that frequently don't work. Also the cups were a money saver, but didn't take the UV very well. Now I can barely touch them without breaking them. There is one mint in there, though. Looks awful, (Way too little nutrition.) but was a cutting 2 summers ago. It will root sure things, it seems, but if I don't increase the nutrient density, they'd be best served by transplanting after roots form.

Are there composting worms in your sand bed to deal with breaking down the detritus?
Do you think a sand bed with redwrigglers could deal with breaking down duckweed?

My system is so nutrient poor that the sand bed grows plants better as detritus accumulates. I put a red wiggler in there from time to time, but rarely find them again. I suspect they exit for one reason or another and end up in the tank and get eaten. Or they die and decompose.

I think some other people do have success with them, but they probably have stocked their fish better. You might check out Jack Spirko, I think he was having some success incorporating wigglers into his systems, though It's been a few years since I looked into it.

Shaun from Edible Acres had success with a bubbler in a watering trough, with very little nutrients.
I know you circulated the water but maybe it wasn't aerated enough?

I'm hoping to add azolla and/or urine to my system for nutrients.
I was thinking I could harvest azolla or duckweed by using your tee setup,  with 1/4 mesh instead of the filter floss.
By dropping the tiny plants directly onto the sand, the worms could turn them into usable nutrients.
Maybe an airlift pump would be better at avoiding clogs.

Speaking of duckweed, your crayfish and duckweed doing OK in the sump tank?

William Bronson wrote:...using your tee setup...

I took the pump out of that. The way my timer's set up, it doesn't move enough water for meaningful filtration. It's now just sitting on the bottom of the tank, outputting into the hose to the growbed. Someday, I'd like to design a system that pumps water constantly, into a pipe that outlets into the growbed first, but has tees that go up, with a vertical pipe, then elbow back down to the tanks. That way, I could put a timed solonoid valve that would open and water the growbed, then close. Water would continue to circulate in the tanks. I figure I would need two float valves, to stop flow to the two tanks that do not contain the pump. (The system levels via siphon bridge, but the pump (if left on) outruns that, overflowing one tank and emptying the other.)

Speaking of duckweed, your crayfish and duckweed doing OK in the sump tank?

The crawdads seem to have died. No sign of them in at least a year. I'm not sure I understand the lifecycle of duckweed. Every winter, I swear it's all disapeared, and go get some more. This year, I decided to see what happens. If I can't keep it, I'll put fish in that tank and move on. A few days ago, I spotted two or three tiny duckweeds. Yesterday, maybe a dozen? If they'll try to make it, I'll give 'em the chance. Maybe I'll learn something.