Bigger Quarantine System

By TCLynx, on December 23rd, 2010 New Quarantine system

Finally, I moved the waterfall tank back by the two North Grow beds on my big system and turned that into my new Aquaponics Quarantine system. Tank over 200 gallons and about 200 gallons worth of grow bed.

That should be enough to make a decent quarantine system I would hope.

Trick with a small aquaponics system though is that there needs to be enough flow and aeration to keep the dissolved oxygen up for the fish as well. The choice of pump for such an aquaponics system is very important. I found that with too many fish, tilapia would not eat well if I didn’t have supplemental aeration in that tank.

After this, I’ve decided that an aquaponics quarantine system needs to be a full complete Aquaponics system in it’s own right. Keep some fish in it always right up until stocking it with new fish to be quarantined. Smaller fish might be kept in larger than normal numbers for a time but then the numbers reduced after the quarantine period and keep a small number of fish in the quarantine system to keep it cycled up and ready at all times.

While the plants can keep going in an aquaponics system without fish, the bio-filter if left without fish will be reduced and a sudden increase in fish load will entail cycling the bio-filter back up to the new load. The mineralization of solids in a system might provide some ammonia to the bio-filter bacteria but this won’t be enough to keep the bio-filter cycled up for a heavy fish load.

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Lumber and Liner termite damage

By TCLynx, on December 24th, 2010 Wet corner

wet under liner

before emptying the bed

Well, I finally discovered my mistake in building with lumber and liner in Florida. Termites have caused some of my grow beds to begin leaking. Time to make a change. We will replace the middle leaking grow bed with two rubbermaid stock tanks of 100 gallons each. Each rubbermaid stock tank grow bed will sit on concrete blocks instead of needing a stand. They are deep grow beds and will provide lots of filtration for the money. I like deep grow beds for aquaponics. The 100 gallon stock tanks cost only a tiny bit more than the 50 gallon stock tanks which are almost the same footprint but would require a stand to bring them up to a nice working height. Sure the deep grow beds require more media to fill them but they provide more filtration. Filtration is all important in Aquaponics. Think of the deep grow beds as providing more space for media.

empty bed

Keeping gravel alive

storing gravel

Termites ate into liner

termite damage in wood

At the time of these pictures, there was only one grow bed leaking. We had to remove gravel from one grow bed to replace it and we had to shift another of the grow beds over to make room for two stock tanks in the middle of the aquaponics set up.

new grow bed on blocks

Installing rubbermaid tanks

100 gallon Rubbermaid tanks sitting on concrete blocks are high enough up that they can drain into an aquaponics sump tank that is sunk most of the way into the ground but with a top rim up above the ground surface to keep heavy rains from washing into the tank. A 100 gallon stock tank up on concrete blocks is a comfortable working height for most people to work with the plants

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My “Net Pots” or cups with wicks

By TCLynx, on December 18th, 2010 Cup with holes

cup with holes 2

This will be a long one with lots of pictures. Back when I started doing Hydroponics I was too cheap to buy proper net pots for my DWC but I happened to eat yogurt regularly from little cups with a lip around the top. They are made of thin plastic, easy to punch holes in and in my county, not even recycled so it made perfect sense to me to re-use them.

I simply punch holes in the bottom and fill with plant and whatever media. This worked well but was very tedious to transplant small seedlings into once they were big enough for the roots to reach the bottom and get water so I would have to monitor the water level very carefully right after transplanting new seedlings as well.

Later I discovered that I could use a rayon mop string as a wick which made it possible to keep a small seedling moist or even start the seeds direct in the cups! This saves lots of time handling small seedlings.

Rayon mop

String cut in half and tied

It is important to get the Rayon Mop as cotton doesn’t wick up very far while the rayon can wick water up as much as 4-5 inches.

Can draw moisture up 4-5 inches

chopstick to push string through hole

wick in place

Once the wicks are in place the cups can be filled with gravel and seed or seedlings can be put in place.

keep string up and fill with media

place in pipe

full with wick at surface

plant seed in string

By carefully setting the seed within the string to keep it moist it can germinate right in place and avoid all transplant shock. This works better for some seeds than for others. I have done well with lettuce and cabbage started this way in the wick strings. I have also found that the wick can keep a peat pellet nicely moist in the cups.

The method with seedlings is fairly easy too.

seedlings to transplant

good enough

wash roots

Simply wash off the roots of the seedling and plant it in the cup with the roots touching the wick.

hold wick with roots

planted

fill with media

The basil grows well this way in warm weather.

heading for new home

line of basil

Basil later in the season

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Solids Filtration

By TCLynx, on December 19th, 2010

In Aquaponics, Flood and Drain gravel beds make really good filters, not only for bio-filtration but also for solids filtration.

However, the water going into my water fall tank was direct from the pump out of the in ground fish tank.  I wanted to add some filtration before the water went into the waterfall tank.

top inlet filter Feb 27 2009

I had previously tried a “swirl” filter but my flow through it was too fast for most of the solids to actually settle out and I didn’t like having to dump the solids out of it every other day.  So I tried making another type of filter where the water would simply flow through a bin full of gravel and flow into the waterfall tank.  That idea didn’t work for long though and was clogged up and flowing over the top withing a few days.

Next I hooked up an upflow gravel type filter.  In this the water is pumped into the bottom of the bin and flows up through the gravel before flowing out of the bin.  This worked far better for cleaning up the solids in the water fall tank but didn’t really provide much growing space for the filtration.

lava rock in bottom

While the up flow filter did seem to work for the Aquaponics system I would prefer to use a regular flood and drain grow bed for most of my filtration.
upwelling filter April 16 2009

Any filtration where the water splashes in at the top risks clogging and overflowing as the media slimes up. I have seen this on grow beds with constant inflow in a single location. Timed flow to the beds seems to alleviate this trouble. Upflow filters don’t have the splash and overflow problem but they don’t have much aeration into the media.
upwelling filter full with gravel

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Aquarium Broke

By TCLynx, on December 20th, 2010

At some point I noticed that the Aquarium was leaking and I needed to do something about it. I took apart the aquarium carefully and painstakingly cleaned the glass of all silicone. Then my Mom and I siliconed the parts back together very carefully. Then had to wait while the silicone cured. Finally I was able to re-fill the aquarium, and it BROKE!!!!!

Lumber liner shelf tank

Lumber liner shelf tank 2

So, I decided to try building my own tank for the quarantine aquaponics system with some lumber and liner on the shelf unit where the aquarium had been. This did work for a while until the pressure of the water broke the shelf away from the wall.
Shelf tank with water broke shelf

Argh, for some reason I don’t think fate likes this location for a quarantine aquaponics system. I suppose the aquarium outside was just asking to fail eventually but I’ve not had much luck with other small tanks either. I did finally hook up another tank for small fingerlings.

Fingerling system

This one had a problem with the fish knocking the screens off of the outlet pipes and then the fish getting caught in the pipe. I even cut one fish up with the ball valve once. Not pleasant realizing I’d done that. Keep in mind that when you kill fish in a small quarantine aquaponics system, the water quality can go really poorly very fast. All the more reason to make sure the quarantine aquaponics system is very robust. I’ll have to go back to the drawing board on that one I guess.

I think the next version of the Aquaponics Quarantine system will need to be much bigger.

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More Big system changes

By TCLynx, on December 22nd, 2010

With the addition of the new Big CHIFT PIST fish tank, I decided to remove the waterfall tank and add a new grow bed in it’s place.

removed waterfall tank

Frame for new bed

This change to the aquaponics system will give a place to filter the excess water flow from the new fish tank and provide more filtration for the system overall. The new bed will hold about 200 gallons of gravel.

Liner installed

This bed will also give me a location to plant some bananas and papaya where they will hopefully not get too tall for the greenhouse.

gravel and bananas

I am hoping to flood and drain this bed by loop siphon into the sump tank right next to it.

New Bed Plumbing

Grow bed full

Later on I will find that this bed didn’t work so well for Aquaponics. First, it’s another lumber/liner bed which isn’t such a good idea (I hadn’t yet learned that lesson when I built this one though.) Also loop siphons are not as good for large grow beds with minimal fall to the sump tank. And finally, in Aquaponics, even a dwarf banana might become a beast and I wound up having to chop it down to put up the greenhouse plastic the next winter. This was my first somewhat deeper grow bed though and I do still like the idea of deep grow beds. They offer extra filtration and support of big plants.

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NFT Project

By TCLynx, on December 17th, 2010 Bracing and header tank for NFT pipes

setting up tubes

NFT stands for Nutrient Film Technique and is the method that uses the pipes or channels with the holes and plants set in them.  It is important to filter the Aquaponics fish tank water before sending it through NFT pipes, otherwise the fish poo and uneaten fish feed tends to clump up in the pipes and among the plant roots causing anaerobic, smelly conditions that are not very good for the plants, fish or relations with neighbors.

Cleaning up

For my Aquaponics system at that time, I had a pump in the monster bed that was controlled by a float switch. I set up the plumbing from that pump to go into a header tank above the pipes. That tank would fill up and I did my best to balance things so the tank would slowly drain between pump cycles and provide a continual flow of filtered water to my NFT pipes.

Most of my NFT pipes are 4? sewer pipe with 2 1/2? holes cut to hold my yogurt cup home made net pots (Next blog post will show off my methods with those.)

Header tank

Even with the 4? pipes, plants like basil can grow big enough to cause root clogging and overflows. Using NFT in Aquaponics requires regular checking of the plants and pipes to make sure everything is flowing well and do what pruning or plant removal is necessary to keep things working right.

I find the pipes to be good for small plants and herbs. They are at an easy height to inspect and harvest. Keep in mind that long runs of NFT tend to heat up aquaponics water and can leave it depleted of dissolved oxygen so don’t go running super long distances with just one flow of water.

Removed sump walk

The New look

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