Aquaponics Design phase begin.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

Hello all,

I'm relieved to find an online community to bounce some ideas off of. I have been thinking about aquaponics since I discovered it a year ago on a PBS special. I took notes and started searching for simple design parameters. Such as how many fish will one person eat in a year. I know there is an answer out there but really its subjective to the person. I eat fish maybe every other week so thats maybe 23lbs of fish I'd eat in a year. Anyway, I went out to Olomana Gardens in Waimanalo, Oahu for a tour and have been thinking about designing and building a small home system ever since. Here is what I have come up with so far;

 

3 - 8X2 ft growing beds 12 inches deep (lava rock growing medium)

1 - 250 gallon fish tank

up to 48 lbs of fish at any one time.

 

Here's the twist - 3 - 8X2 ft rabbit cages under the growing beds.

And another twist - Make the fish tank look like a pond by burying most of it and have the return lines from the growing beds cascade as a water fall.

 

The rest of ideas that I want to incorporate are;

 

 3X bell syphons for the flood/drain growing beds.

maybe a smaller pond up higher for duck weed and breeding the replacement talapia.

 

Any helpful ideas are welcome.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

Anybody else do this test???

This is an example of what I mentioned earlier. You can clearly see that the Tritation plunger is already at 8 ppm (check the chart - Fresh Water 72 degrees F and saturation equals 8.7) and then notice that blue water in the test tube hasn't turned clear yet. Which means that I would have to reload my tritator (the instructions clearly state to not disturb the plunger) Is my water really already saturated with Oxygen after a few hours of cycling the tank through my grow bed?

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

3/4 inch supple line filling up the lava bed. The "Black Cinder" lava is super tiny with trillions of tiny pits and bubbles over the surface. This has to be the best medium for a grow bed here. I wouldnt recommend shipping these rocks like they do Hydroton though. Defeats the point of why we are doing this ya know?

 

The beds are slightly slanted to drain toward the other end. The grow bed is ten inches deep from the surface of these lava rocks down to the bottom.

 

Plants include small Herb varieties that I'm familiar with. Basil, Sage, Parsley (Italian and American), Cilantro, A couple Vegitables Eggplant and Hawaiian Chili's which will probabaly gor w the largest. - and Arugula what category is that? I dont know but it sounds like something you would make salad with. I'll put in some manoa lettuce once these plants get this cycled and the nutrients are stablized.

 

I'm going to have to dig out the far end and redo the seal - I think the silicone seal wiggled loose as I cut the stand pipe down an inch. No I have a drip underneath. I ordered a uniseal from TCLYNX for a 1 inch pipe. Hopefully that will sovle the problem.

Thanks for following.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

View of Grow Bed One complete with sacrificial plants basking in the filtered light under the Haliconia's.

 

You can see the 2X6 brace off the front helped out just a bit to keep the bed from warping. I cut the stand pipe down to 9 inches which works very well.  Bell siphon wont break the suction because I dont have a snorkle - what do you know about that? It will break the siphon if there is no water running but since it is a continuos flow water level stays low until I reach in the basket and pull the bell off.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

 

Productive weekend cycling the system and testing the water.

Temp is ~72 degrees F, pH is ~8.12, No ammonia or nitrite, Nitrates are negligible at .01 ppm. Dissolved O2 levels is tough to figure out - I've done the tritation test 8 times and I'm still wondering why I cant get a stable reading - The first D.O. test I did was when the water was still from sitting all night and the result was telling me that it was 9.0 ppm, which at 72DegreeF @ sea level is greater than saturation already. That cant be so I have done the test over and over to bring the test back down to something realistic. Tweaking it the smallest value that I have come up with is 4ppm which is probably where its at and thats after the fountains ran for most of the day.

I added the Lava rock and did the tests again had no effect on any of these except  pH dropped to 8.0

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

16 minutes later and the Bell Siphon has sucked all that water out down to a half inch only on this end because of the slanted bed. No Snorkle required. I am thinking that maybe after I fill up this grow bed with close to 50% black cinder grow bed media then that should also cut my drain time by half down to 8 min. What do you think?

Thanks for following.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

The end of my drain pipe mysteriously begins flowing water - haha and low and behold the pipes work too.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

I was yelling for help and the whole time I was holding my iphone - I probably should have called someone. Finally, James comes to help out turns the water off and I get the Bell siphon outer casing on. Will it work? or will we be standing here all night taking turns holding it up until we scoop at the water out??

 

at this point a few of our questions have been answered.

1). Does it hold water? um well So it only holds water if you stand there and hold the side up to keep it from bowing outward to the brink of a bursting dam. This will need to be addressed with options -

             A). add External support frame,

             B). lower stand pipe,

             C). cut hole in 4X6 support posts to better fit this grow bed.

             D). combination of the three.

 

2). Will the bunnies get crushed by the half ton of water over thier heads?

Notice the bunnies have not been crushed and it doesnt even look like they have moved positions. They could probably feal the fear in the air from me trying to avert disaster and froze still listening to the water. But the real question asked here was will the support shelf hold the wieght of the grow bed filled with water and that answer is yes it is strong enough. Which somewhere along the line I had figured out the math on this structure and had already trusted would work. Anyone know the structural limit to this support shelf? please tell me.

 

3). Will the silicon seal on the stand pipe leak? After help arrived, thanks Jimmy, I checked under the support to see if the silicon seal was holding - It is dry and the bunnies are dry too. If you have been following me along this blog you know that the silicon package  states that it is limited to 30 gallons - From this test it supported nearly 100 gallons and didnt leak. Was the 30 gallon limit a legal disclaimer? Was the 30 gallon limit an overengineered number? Did I misread the package that they meant the 30 gallon was shear weight? I wonder how long over time before it starts to deteriorate to the point of leakage?

 

4). Will the Bell Siphon work? I cant hold my breath that long to find out.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

How about that Tahitian Gardenia? Yep got it to flower about 5 times - this image I snagged off the internet.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

no time to turn the water off - I have to stay here to hold up the edge of the grow bed to keep it from overflowing. Also notice the wave action caused by the garden hose. It could also over flow that edge before it gets a chance to go down the pipe.

The cinder block? what is it doing here? well the plastic grow bed was warped up in the middle and since I siliconed the stand pipe in when it was dry there was not enough wieght from either water or grow bed media to hold the plastic down so I used a cinder block and will keep it in there until I get my black cinder lava rock for my growing medium in place.

[Philip Vanderhoofven]

Um this is scary stuff and the day after halloween - yep I more scared right when I took this picture then if a zombie came around the corner. I would be like "Thank God a Zombie came by to give me a hand"

 

I know what the problem is - I had to warp the ends up in order to get the grow bed to fit in the space. I had to squeeze the bed into place by an inch and a half. Well that nice bend around the top of the grow bed is supposed to strengthen the whole bed.

The other thing which is tough to notice is  that my grow bed slants toward the camera over the 8 feet length by more than an inch. It is tough to tell because the middle is bowing out. and you can clearly see that the water will over flow the edge of the bed before it has a chance to meniscus on the rim of my ten inch stand pipe.

 

Should I go turn the Garden hose off which is filling up the bed with water for this test?  -  or talk about that nice looking plant at the end of the bed which I helped bring back to life.

It is a Tahitian Gardenia