Building The Modular System

The Finished Product

Here we got the beds running well. The basis of the system is to have a modular system that is easily expandable to cater for any size family needs. The depth of the bed is 300mm which is a constant, the plastic supplier supplies sheets that are 1m by 2m so it take two sheets to make one grow bed.

This is significantly cheaper than getting one made from fiber glass. Where we stay it is not readily available and must be brought in from the nearest city which is 3 1/2 hours of driving away. Fortunately the company delivers every week so I have no problems sourcing material from them. The frame is welded together and painted. I've only made four frames to date but will make two more in the future. Aquaponics gives you the ability to grow a lot of plants in a very small area. This is great for getting productivity out of a small area, but is horrible if you need to control things. Roots get tangled often when they search for nutrients.

Final Frame

This is the final frame design for now at least. It has a support for my swirl filter which will be explained later. By the time I got to this frame, I had most of the manufacture kinks sorted out and it works well.

Compared to many I know I've not chosen the easiest or the most recyclable technique. I needed to have a portable system at the time so this was the product. 

Buckets of Fun

Here's the inside view of the grow bed. I welded in black to show it up easily. I must say at this point, that I prefer to use black for the grow beds as they take the sun much better than white and white plastic allows algae to grow on the inside as many IBC users have found out.

Welding plastic is a skill that can be learned and the more you try, the better you get. My advice if you try this is make sure you know how to work safely and get help. You always need help to move chords or things out of the way. Once you start a weld, you only get to stop when you're finished.

Things to balance are the pressure with which you feed material in through the welding nozzle and the speed you travel along the weld. The weld is weak if you go too fast or press too weak. If you go too slow you melt it too much and you can't fuse the plastic in the weld. Too hard and your hands want to fall off soon.

These grow beds have a volume of 600 liters and when filled with 19mm stones it has a cavity area of 200 liters and 400 liters is taken up by stone. I haven't measured it exactly, but by watching changes in my sump tank it is about right. To make the system work you need a bell siphon and here's my design. It's real cheap and all in all costs about the same as coffee in a coffee shop.

The finished bell siphon looks like this. My bell has a clear perspex window on top to monitor the drain cycle. I like to see the system start its siphon and check how easily the siphon breaks. The fitting I use are all standard 25mm nylon irrigation fittings and I just push them into together.

So here are all the parts for the stand pipe in the middle. First notice the very short piece of pipe on the very left. It's not short but actually welded into the bottom of the grow bed, it stick out about 120mm below. I don't use bulk head fittings and this is leak proof and doesn't need silicon sealer.

Here the stand pipe is fitted together and ready to push into the down pipe. By changing the height of the standpipe, you change the maximum height of water in the grow bed, I don't, but you can if you want.

Left to right, the stand pipe is fitted into position, the bell is fitted over it and the shroud which is made from 104mm sewerage piping is fitted around the lot before filling up with stones. If you are using stone crush like me you hold the shroud in place and fill stones around it. By the time it is 300mm deep you can let go and it will stay in place. If you use round pebbles or clay balls, you need to keep it in place with a brick for a while till it all settles nicely.

The pilot plant

Committing to the adventure

With the first system well behind me, I wanted to make a go of the whole aquaponics story. With a limited pocket of funds, I was fortunate to be given a 5000 liter tank. I decided to use the same buckets for grow beds and used an old support frame for a vacuum forming machine I'd built years before.

Since I hadn't yet organised the bell siphons and was still uncertain about hem, I built the toilet cistern valve flushing system. It worked amazingly and wasn't very hard to get working. Water filled up the grow beds and the white bucket at the same time. This was done because there was a 50mm pipe connecting the three vessels. When the water level rose to the predetermined height, the water starts to pour out the white pipe in the bucket and fills up the upside down 2 liter plastic coke bottle. There a small hole in the lid of the bottle about 3mm in diameter, so you have to make sure that you fill the buckets up just faster than it can drain out the plastic bottle.

Eventually the bottle is heavy enough and it falls down pulling the wooden lever which in turn activates the cistern valves and the system literally flushes. It works absolutely perfect until you get something preventing the seal from working on the cistern valve or something blocks the hole in the bottle lid.

Needles to say it worked well for months before giving problems. I nursed it for ages before finally dismantling it and replacing the system. In the picture you will see we grew a lot of different herbs here and the system was ultimately our seed starting box.

We also put this plant with massive elephant ears in and it just grew and grew. About four months back we dismantled the system and planted the elephant eared plant in the garden. The chickens damaged it badly so it's back in our new aquaponics system.

The nasturtium was an amazing plant and grew like a weed. Oddly enough it is good to chew for sore throats and burned like horse radish. I ate bundles of it every day I got home from work.

The tomato plant which grew gave us buckets of cherry tomato fruit and we filled packets every second day or so. What I didn't know was how the plants grow and behave so as it grew it looked like it was starting to die, but that's the way it grows and spreads. It grows and after a while it loses all it's leaves in the center.

Seeing the First Fruit

It was very interesting to watch a micro climate develop and all kinds of bugs were building homes and moving around the grow bed. It was at this point when I started to realize how capable aquaponics is of developing a well functioning ecosystem all by itself.

That is actually what become the basis of your growth in understanding of the systems, you need to see all the parts work together. You become the care taker and conductor of the garden as a symphony.

Left you can see the nasturtium and the start of the Cherry Tomato monster. When we cleared out the nasturtium the tomato plant took over. The two are great symbiotic plants and a number one companion planting option.

This system had some real bonus features and we spent hours as a family sitting having coffee in the afternoon next to the system. Kids fed the fish. We stuck our hands and feet in the tank and the fish nibbled them.

Having something like this is great for the family and for anyone looking for something to do to bring the family together, this is definitely a must.

My first Aquaponics Setup

The very first system.

It starts somewhere

It's hard to place the exact date I started looking at aquaponics.  One thing I do remember is that it was the idea of having all those fish that attracted me. Our kids were already home schooled and anything that looks like learning is a must for us.

The first system

Well this believe it or not, was the first system. I by now had seen all the many systems people had on the internet.Two years ago there was very little information easily available. I was skeptical and after one adventurous afternoon fishing, I came home with a fishing tackle box full of live Mozambique Tilapia.

I had to make a plan fast and so the fish were transferred into a black rough tote. My old fishing tank gear was resurrected and a quick visit to the hardware store for a few essentials and this was what happened on a Friday night.

How it worked

Based on what I'd seen on a number of aquaponics forums, I'd decided to try building an auto siphon system. The green bucket was filled with stones I had lying around in the garden. A hole was drilled in the side for the pipe to be pushed through. Inside the bucket the pipe bends down with an elbow and the pipe forms an upsidedownIt is a very tight fit so you don't get any leaks. A fish tank pump is placed in the bottom bucket and water is pumped up to the top. As the bucket on top fills with water it raises past the height of the outlet an the siphon will start.

It worked but required daily adjustment and tweaking. For anyone trying this, it is not a good idea. There are some people who get them to work for a while, but the main thing is to have something that doesn't require heavy maintenance.

Alongside you can see some of the veggies we grew in there. They worked well and it was such a pleasure to watch them grow, that we soon expanded the system.

The first problems

As I said the siphon required a lot of fiddling with and from what I know now, I'm sure it could have been done better.

I'd like to revisit this system and fit a proper bell siphon in so that anyone who'd like to give this a go can get it to work on a small budget.

The sump tank was too small to keep more than one bucket grow bed going. PS when you build a system like this they call it toteponics. It certainly works though and if you don't mind all the maintenance then it's your ticket. But there were several issues. I didn't plan this system ahead of time. Some of the issues were:

• High maintenance.
• Pump was too large and had to be throttled 3excessively.
• I grew too many plant to close together.
• Sunlight was an issue during winter.
• I had no idea how big plant could get.

The pictures on the right above and alongside will show how many different veggies and plant can grow in here. The nasturtium with it's big round leaves just love aquaponics and is an awesome medicinal plant.

One thing I got right here but failed in a later improvement of the system is the nutrient distribution. The bacteria that does all the ammonia to nitrate converting colonizes the stones closest to the nutrient feed. So make separate filling points on the buckets.

Below you can see I have all three buckets balanced with a pipe on the front and at the bottom. The idea was that the water level would remain the same in each bucket. Well it didn't work. I also only had one auto siphon seen in the far left of the photo below. The balancing pipe had the job of bringing all the water through during the drain cycle. Well it slowed matters down so you had to set the system with surgical precision.

Since stuff like to grow on the insides of pipes, as the days pass, the water slows down more and your system needs to be constantly set.

I tried a few more iterations of this system. On the good side the plants were growing and I was encouraged to keep going.

This little system still made for a great conversation piece and everyone who visited was obligated to come outside and marvel at our garden growing in stones.

If you would like to start a small system like this, it is great for things like mint and cherry tomato tree's. The mint will be limited to only the bed you grow it in and the cherry tomato trees don't need a lot of area to be rooted in. I do intend to build some satellite units in the future to do this. Both plants are absolute monsters and I don't recommend mixing them in a big grow bed. They both just take over.

Welcome to our home

Welcome to our home. We've decided to blog the story of our aquaponics adventure here is our own backyard in South Africa. Our whole family has been involved from the beginning and most of the journey has been recorded in bits and pieces on Practical Aquaponics where I've gone under the name Biggles1212.

We would like to pave the way for those interested parties to copy and / or have relevant information to starting their own system. Our system doesn't really end with the fish and veggies, but we've included chickens and worms.

What you will see is what we've built from readily available materials. Unfortunately things are a bit backward in our town and if you want something special it comes from a long way away. Hope this site is informative and helpful.