Owen's EPIC Aquaponics System | Sand beds Swamp Beds Barramundi + MORE

how's it going folks we're up here at owen's place today to check out a very awesome and impressive aquaponics system we're going to hop inside and start checking out the system from the fish tanks and then we'll finish out here with the grow beds and the sand beds behind me where to begin as a uh is the interesting question uh basically i wouldn't say this is a hundred percent an aquaponic system uh it's more of an aquaculture system with the bonus of fruit and veg coming off it mine's geared up to produce fish and a lot of them what i have is three tanks in a normal growing scenario i have a fingerling tank i have a medium-sized tank for the medium-sized fish and then i have the grow out tank so what i'll do is i'll cycle the fingerlings in they'll eventually get moved into the mid-size tank and then new fingerlings will come in and then the when the middle ones grow they go into the grow out tank so basically it's always rotating so you always have fish what i bank on is a hundred fish in every tank at any one time so you'll have a hundred fingerlings a hundred medium size and a hundred ready to eat it's a little bit out of whack at the moment because i did a rebuild at christmas so i've had to basically start again on the sizes so just to get me up to speed a bit quicker and a bit more productive i have the barramundi and the fingerling tank which will soon be moving the to the grow out tank it's just by the time i'd finished building stocks of fingerlings and that were well out so i had to had to had to do what i could do to get it productive again and you were saying that these guys have been in there for three months these guys are only three months old uh when i got them they were fingerlings from three to five centimeters most of them being about the three centimeters i did a check on them last weekend and they range from 20 to 30 centimeters now and anywhere from 100 to 300 grams already for our hot warmer climate they're like basically our trout yeah basically if um if you can get them at a good size at summer which can be hard every year to do hence why i hated this tank at the moment you can grow them out to a decent size in the three five months have you got really hot weather otherwise it's a jade perch which are nearly bulletproof no heating a little bit more longer weight than these guys these guys in the same time will come out double to triple the weight you'll get out of a jade perch but you have a lot more waste from them as well so and just we'll just talk quickly about keeping these guys warm because we are in our winter here just very briefly explain your setup if you could during the day i run it off an electric heater my house has 72 solar panels so basically electricity is free during the day so during the day i run two heaters that are 2500 watts total so one's 1500 the other one over here is a thousand excuse me fishies so those two heat the tank during the day and then at night time because electricity's gone through the roof i came up with the idea to use a camp heater a camp heater's basically a gas hot water system that's portable i've got a ink bird controller so it detects when the temperature is too low and fires up the pump which then pumps it through the hot water system it comes out of the hot water system through a coil of stainless steel and back into the barrel again where the pump is so it's basically a closed loop heating system and that way you don't get any of the nasty copper or anything like that out of the heater not a problem and just to point out owen is a sparky by trade yeah that's why it looks like a nightmare so that's why you can also do this um the average backyarder maybe seek a professional to do it for you then everyone says oh you're going to gas yourself in the shed basically what i've got is an overhead duct work that pulls all the nasties out and goes to an exhaust fan on the side of the shed there and it pumps it all outside so when the heater turns on so does the exhaust fan and all the gas and everything gets pumped outside i've got a carbon monoxide alarm there that i've never set off with the system i have with a couple of cars though once or twice and you were saying you've also got um the the back to base um fire alarms and smoke detectors so you're pretty much all covered in case something goes pear shaped yeah i've got the two smoke alarms one here one at the entry to the shed and they connect with one at my house so if anything goes wrong in here i know what temp do you run your barrier mine i run at 25 only to slow down the growth rate because they're growing too fast for this time of year but 28 if you have them in water that's 28 degrees the things will double over three weeks so your ph range for the barra because they're such heavy poo producers it's running a little bit lower than the rest of the system just in case the ammonia does spike a little bit i don't run into huge issues it's not going to be an issue with all the biomedia in it but i hate losing fish don't blow me up and what about the other tanks what are they running on bridge these ones are all running at 6.7 6.7 yeah so even 6.5 really in the scheme of things isn't that low of course we need some biofiltration for all of this so we've got the grow beds outside but you've also got standalone bio filters for every tank yes because this is the fingerling tank and i don't want to introduce any diseases or anything like that when they first come in this tank can be fully shut off and it's got the two bio filters on it which keep the fish nice and happy and i like that you've also using those socks uh yeah i've bought these filter socks they're proper aquaculture ones and they'll filter anything down to 200 microns they do a bit of heavy lifting so i don't have to run more of the mechanical filtration than anything also too i like using them because i can throw them in the washing machine and i got a washer machine in the shed and i do that once a week and i can feed my other fruit trees that are outside the shed so nothing's going to waste basically everything's staying within your system your property is a system so this is your your medium stage grow out what have you got in here at the moment eel tailed catfish and jade perch are in there at the moment uh it's a bit of a hodgepodge because the eel tales take about three times as long as the jades before you get something decent eating out of it they're just slow growing and they'll clean out the tank for you a bit too so i just add them in because they're really good chewing but they take forever to grow and also notice that in these two tanks you've got pumps running in each pump in each tank keep in mind people that as owen said this is basically an aquaculture system that is adapted to grow plants with so these pumps here they feed directly into your bio is that correct yes uh so the fingerling tank it has its own two that's that one there and this one over here we saw before uh the medium tank it has well it shares it's got its own there and it shares the big boy with the grow out tank and this is one mammoth mammoth biofilter folks how much media is in this big ibc one uh 700 liters so you were saying all up you've got around about a thousand liters is it worth of bio filtration separate to the grow beds yeah there's a thousand liters of k1 in the system as it stands that's more than enough biofiltration for these three tanks alone for anyone who's concerned about um yeah issues of biofiltration no this will do i think it's one liter for every 500 grams of fish that's about right yeah so if you do the maths on that i've got a thousand liters i can have as many fish as the heart desires really i'd actually run into problems with aeration before i'd run into problems with the bio filtration so there is a lot of um pumping involved in this system with the air as well as you've seen but then again it's you can never have too much air can you no see what i've done is basically i like to cover bases one thing does two things at once so i've got a pump it'll do a bio filter plus it will also do the fish tank not that that one's in chuck it back in yeah that'll help a little bit but i'm getting that much that comes through the bio filter anyway the big one produ has got that much air going into it i could probably turn these off and not be too worried about it um this one here as you can see it's got the three air pumps going into it it only needs two to run but because i run such a load large load of fish uh i run the three so if one does break down i've got the peace of mind that you know i'm up not up late at night worrying about are my fish still alive with this system basically everything goes back to the sump eventually the sumps outside uh the sump feeds up into all the fish tanks there's a pump out here that pumps to there all of it has the capability and does flow to the sump outside fresh water comes in from the sump goes through the fish tank through the filters then back to the sump the big tank it's slightly different because i added the sand beds in uh so i changed how that flowed so i could feed the sand beds the fish poo right at the end there right at the end what happens is the water flows out of here goes through a radial flow filter which there's a pump in the bottom of and it's on a timer what it does every two hours it is the pump turns on and it flies it out to the sand beds and takes pretty much all the poo that the big tank produces out to it not a problem and we'll have a look at those sand beds in a moment this one being it's got medium-sized fish in it it goes through the large bio filter through the smaller bio filter and then flows down and out to the sump as well so that's why you're basically relying on all the socks everywhere they're doing the heavy lifting where it comes to the solids for those tanks for the smaller tanks the socks are the key the big tank the radial flow filter does the heavy lifting don't have a look outside yeah so the sump tank there's a uh there's a couple of red claw and some yabbies in there they clean up the little leftover bits and pieces they're on the menu at christmas i put them in at the start of the year and at the end of the year pull them out of the sup they go on the christmas dinner list so you were saying as well that um having them all labeled actually helps you when it comes to monitoring flow rates yeah because i've got such a hodgepodge of beds everything's got to flow at a different rate so to keep everything simple i can just lift up the top of the sump and i can see what beds flowing how fast and then i can adjust them all accordingly for every bed there's a tap all the way down the line same with the sand beds they got to tap on them just so it doesn't flow too fast and disturb the sand and you've also got a little satellite power board yeah this is a temporary board builders use them as temporary power usually when they're building your house uh sometimes they'll hang it on your house afterwards and that becomes your main board but a lot of times they put a temporary one in that you can just plug in so it goes over to the power point on the side of the shed and basically feeds the business end of town so what i got in here is the power for the two pumps one pump pumps the water to all the fish tanks inside the other pump pumps all the water to the grow beds but not the sand beds the sand beds come out of the radial flow the grow beds outside are on the timer which is here just so i can turn them off at night because it saves me two degrees loss at night which is a pretty big thing when you've got barra in the yes they uh they like it warm anything below 18 you're going to have lots of issues also too the air pumps housed in here which feeds down and out and goes to all the floating raft i've noticed you've got a couple of different growing methods predominantly rough for what looks like a cos or romaine lettuce that's cos lettuce um not that you think by the size of me but we love salads pretty much i rotate uh the lettuce over and over i don't let them grow to maturity i'm i just like the high turnover that you have so pretty much i can do about 100 lettuce at once in three different stages so i've got the larger ones that i eat they're not real large at the moment because we've had all the rain and i've had to re-jig everything yet again hence why there's a lot of snow peas floating around here and there because i've been using the snow pea leaves instead of the lettuce leaves so you can you add them to your lettuce gives it a little bit extra flavor and it buffers out your lack of lack of greens if you're in the situation i was so basically i start off at the front where it's more protected from the sun and all the seedlings go in there and then i move them up as they get bigger and bigger and then when they're not much bigger than this i usually start taking them these ones here are grown out to seed so i'm letting them go but you can see i've been greedy and picked a few bits off when they're when they look good in the salad they go and you were saying you want to save um seeds from these guys because they just did exceptionally well for you yeah these ones were in a batch that did really really well even though i've sort of maimed them quite a bit by taking all the leaves off it i want to seed them out so because they just grew so well i might as well save the seeds and do a batch yeah and over here you've got a couple of uh just are those soil bags uh yeah they're the front and back of the root pouches basically the bottom of it bottom half of it is filled with sand uh pearlite and vermiculite these ones have in it just to add a little bit of extra air because this is what i call a swamp bed this one it basically does a few different jobs it holds my more long-term plants it's always provides water and i've got a ton of duckweed in there which i feed to the chickens the chickens love the duckweed the fish will eat it if they're hungry enough but it's not their favorite so these one here it's not too dissimilar to your bathtub you've got in a way dual root zone these ones just have sand in the bottom just enough to cover where the water level is and then dirt on top um these couple have potatoes in them they've only just recently been done and there was a capsicum over there that didn't really light the floating raft so i've just chucked it in there for now basically i'm gearing up for when it gets a bit warmer in a month or two so i'll have my tomatoes go on the sand beds what everyone wants to know about ah yes the love-hate relationship we all have with these things yes um basically i put it in there's you know we've had the long going argument over you know whether they're good they're bad um from a growing point of view they're good it basically gives you a lot a lot more ease in planning uh things seem to grow really well in them but they are a bit of a pain in the bum um but i don't know overall they are a benefit they you should add them to a system i'm not saying make your whole system stand but they're definitely a good addition to a system my my main takeaway is exactly what you you're doing with yours using it for somewhere to deposit your solids waste pretty much it uh just gives me that little bit extra time because i originally had the filter socks on the large tank and with a big load of fish you are changing filter socks over and over it just becomes a chore hence why i rebuilt the system to incorporate these so this way pretty much the majority of the waste goes into this bed and i never really have to look at it you know i don't have to touch the waste i'm not running a mineralisation tank that's another job you don't have to do on saturday yeah it's another job you don't have to do so do you find you get a lot of muck on the bed or does it disappear no it disappears pretty quickly it um i don't know whether it's the sun or the water or a mixture of things with the plants but yeah it breaks down very rapidly and these are the inlets for the actual beds themselves yep what you generally find with a lot of sand beds not all of them some work fine that the water coming in will washes the sand away a great use of the pouch there just to help you know break the water flow off a bit this basically directs it otherwise you end up with this big fissure here and then when it stops filling with water the sand rolls back in on itself so your furrows are always falling at the end by doing this it just directs the water straight in and gives it a nice flow around everything that way you don't lose the sides of the bed i suppose we should talk about the drainage at the other end so i've seen online that people do a lot of um rock filters around their the outlets so you didn't worry about this one's just a straight shade cloth yeah this one's just a straight shade cloth uh the first time around i did do all that i started off i did the stand pipe then i went geo fabric then i put the shade cloth over the geo fabric followed by 40 mil stones then 20 mil stones then 10 mil and then you know on and on until i was up to a sand kind of thing after putting it all together and watching it i realized i didn't need all that so i just this one is basically a standpoint with a bit of shade cloth cable tied around it that's it and both of them still filter fine this one goes a bit quicker because it hasn't got the geo fabric and that on it oh really okay yeah if you just go a piece of shade cloth wrapped around it twice that's all you need to do excellent so basically your sand beds are acting as your as your solids waste filter and your mineralization tank so it does the heavy lifting on that side and it's one less chore to do also biofiltration and somewhere to plant some pretty nice looking carrots these are baby carrots i've probably left some of them too long um i didn't thin it out originally there we go there's a there's a baby carrot in inverted commerce that's a nice looking carrot yeah then the pouch is in the middle i'm running a test at the moment so what i've done is i've seeded the pouches and the sand bed at the same time with the same things so i want to see whether things will grow a bit quicker in the jill root zone compared into the sand itself i've done the snow peas over there this is snow peas here at the moment the sand beds winning with the snow peas the radishes they were planted at the same time i dare say these radishes are slightly winning in the race so far and then i've got a few lettuce seeds i put in there too and the lettuce is slightly beating the the soil as well unless you have a crack you're not going to know are you well that's it and also too because of the size of the bed um i could have could have gone three furrows in it but with the size fish tank and the amount of fish i stock i need the extra gap in there to allow for all the water flow and the fish waste then i sat there and i looked at this nice big gap and i'm like well there's a waste of a waste of area i might as well chuck these root pouches in and see how you go away it goes and as you can see from the other ones that went in earlier which i haven't thinned out yet but it's on the list always on the list yeah everything's on the list so what we've got some broccoli in there yeah they're late season broccoli and cauliflower there i'll probably just have them smaller than usual i just wanted to see how they do the cabbages are looking okay yeah yeah the cabbages are taking off they've actually taken over too soon because i've got a few oh okay yeah see that one's split it's been in there too long but this one's due to come out so yeah that one's split too so it happens yeah oh just left them in too long that's the only thing you got to be real careful with your root growing stuff here we go here's one there's a nice one yeah there's a nice one and over the back there that's obviously a passion fruit that's a passion fruit um because this section of it in summer it is just glaringly hot usually i run a big shade cloth over the top of this but i thought two birds one stone i like passion fruit so may as well grow one up and over provide a little bit of shade if it gets too far i'll just thin it out but yeah i can have the passion fruit growing over the top then and that's the lemon over in the corner uh that one's actually a mandarin mandarin okay that's right i asked you the other day and you said that so obviously with all these fish you will be harvesting them uh do you want to tell us how you clean them up oh hang on put you in frame that's all right this here i have a 500 liter it used to be a rainwater tank uh repurposed it it's now my purge tank there's a couple of family members i have that don't like the plain taste of freshwater fish so i find i can salt up this tank and purge the fish that are ready to eat in it for a few days and it just gives them that little bit of a salty flavour gets rid of any you know other flavors you may get from feeding commercial feed yeah and it just makes it that nice crisp clean taste with a little bit of salt for people that don't like fresh water fish and it's basically just a recycled rainwater tank you put a pond liner in a pond sealant ah yeah it was an old water tank from outside it had sat outside a shed for years upon years even though it only had rain water through it i just wanted to seal it up just so it's 100 for food i don't think the makers of these tanks are had them food grade back when these were made okay so i just put the sealer in there just to make a hundred percent that i wasn't poisoning everyone that's fair enough and i remember you actually painting the outside during one of our um supporter hangouts that was pretty cool yeah yeah i like to listen but i like to do as well yeah exactly yeah so um owen has come along every now and then and i'm giving us a bit of a tourist doing work in here during the hangout so it's been great just seeing little bits and pieces being added and the expansion do you reckon it'll go much bigger um if anything i'd probably capitalize on the vegetable side of things okay 100 fish every four months is pretty much enough for my family my family's getting smaller not bigger you just have five kids at home i'm down to one now 100 fish for three people every four months is enough to get you by it'd be greedy if anything if i if i went bigger yeah i could eat fish every night but who wants to eat the same thing every night i'd probably extend the garden out of the fence yeah and you were saying you were interested in trying one of hucho's um grow boxes yeah camucho has those grow boxes um basically it's like a small raised bed uh that's filled with a pond liner and then you put the gravel on top of that and you have a little float valve in there which lets the water in and make sure your plants always have water and then you put the grow bags in there and do it that way i wouldn't mind putting the system up so it powers up one of hucho's ideas so it's basically will end up being a uh jewel root zone almost pretty much uh there's a fair bit of dual route zone in here i found it's pretty much the way to go uh aquaponics is pretty close-minded when it comes to how things should be everyone has manuals that are written eight years ago based on 20 year ago ideas i think we need to evolve a bit and just take bits from here and there and make it all one you know the more productive you can make a small space the better it is yeah exactly so once more thank you very much to owen for inviting us along here today it's been a real education just seeing how he's got the aquaculture side of the system set up very impressive indeed and do keep in mind that this started off as an aquaculture system and he tried to make it more sustainable by utilizing the waste to grow veg and that's why we've got the bit of a hybrid growth situation going on outside of the shed here and as always thank you very much to those folks who come along every week and thumb up the videos and leave a comment or just a g'day in the comment section down below love chatting with you down there thank you very much to everyone who's supporting the channel as well by buying the backyard aquaponics beginners guide i'm having a ball helping you folks out thanks as well to you folks supporting us on the different membership pages the youtube one and also our patron-based one farm your own yard thanks for the support folks so we'll pretty much we'll leave it there i'll let owen get back to his weekend i do hope you're all having a fantastic one and your gardens and aquaponics is booming and i'll catch you next video cheers folks and happy growing

Channel: Rob Bob's Aquaponics & Backyard Farm

Views: 147,822

Keywords: sand bed aquaponics, barramundi aquaponics, aquaponics Australia, aquaponics setup, aquaponics systems design, rob bob aquaponics, aquaponics for beginners, DWC aquaponics, rob bob's backyard, aquaponics systems, aquaponics system, aquaponic Bog Beds, how to aquaponics, نظام الأكوابونيك, aquaponik, ਇਕਵਾਪੋਨਿਕਸ, acuaponia, アクアポニックス, 鱼菜共生, aq, aquaponics diy, diy aquaponics, അക്വാപോണിക്സ്, akwabunik, Аквапоника, Akuaponik, aquaponics sand beds, iAVs, barramundi, Aquaculture

Id: t7zftIYAKGM

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 14 2022