Starting an Aquaponics System | How to Start & What You Need

g'day folks it's rob here and in today's clip we're going to be running through a couple of pointers to help you plan and start an aquaponics system and get you folks well on your way to harvesting your own tasty veggies quickly for you folks who are new to aquaponics and don't quite know how it all works I do have a clip called what is aquaponics you can click on it up there and it'll also be listed in the playlist that I have in the description and in a little thumbnail button you can click on at the end of the clip but just as a real quick explanation what we're trying to do is clean up the waste generated by the fish that wastewater is pumped out to the grow beds and there some bacteria process that waste into plant available nutrients they take up those nutrients and the clean water is then recycled back into the fish tank so that whole cycle is called the nitrogen cycle and we try to initiate it in aquaponics doing something called cycling it's just the common name for it I won't cover it here we'll get to that more towards the end of the clip just to keep everything in order as we go through now to begin with we've got to start to think about where we want to locate our system and how much space we can dedicate to it so when it comes to trying to work out where to locate your system obviously you've got to consider a few points firstly the amount of space you have available to set it up and secondly you need to work out which way the Sun travels through different seasons through the year where we are here in the southern hemisphere our winter Sun travels through the northern sky so I have this set up so north is over there so we're going to get a good amount of morning Sun and actually all the way pretty much all towards sunset we're going to be getting Sun on this system come summer because we're in the subtropics will also get about 4 to 5 hours of morning Sun on here and then in the afternoon yeah it will be shaded to an extent but I'm not too concerned about that because we mainly grow a lot of leafy greens and just quickly obviously you folks in the northern hemisphere in America Europe and the UK you'll be trying to position your system in a southerly facing position because that's where the Sun travels through your winter sky so also need electricity so there's something to keep in mind we need to stay somewhere close enough to a stable electrical source I've got a lead plugged into a power board in my box there and I'm running an external power lead underneath the floor of the deck and it comes down to under this grow bed here where the two plugs are joined within a waterproof container definitely a good idea because you don't want any jew or anything to get in between the connection there and cause a short circuit so your proximity to utilities is definitely something you need to consider not only the power but also the water for topping up your sump tank as well and another location issue you may have is if you're in a high rainfall area if you're having a lot of rainfall coming into the system all the time what can happen is the sump tank can overflow and you can dilute your nutrients down so one thing to consider if you can't keep it under cover is to make sure that your sump tank this is basically where the pump is housed make sure that the sump tank is large enough to be able to hold the amount of water that will be generated through you know your typical wet season you will find though that once the beds are planted out those plants will transpire a lot of the water and you will need to do weekly top ups now as for the size of the system you can set up you're actually limited by the amount of bio filtration you have now there's a general rule of thumb that says you can have one fish you want to go out to one pound or 500 grams per 25 liters of bio filtration you have in your grow beds which is this clay media well it could be rocks or lava rocks or something along those lines so what we need to do is work out how much area we can dedicate to a grow bed and then how much in volume of those grow beds will be so that means in a beginner system that this grow bed will be able to process the waste from 10 mature fish that we want to stock the system with so that's something to consider to begin with and then from there you want to make sure that your fish tank is at least large enough to give every fish you having their 25 liters of water so this system here a 1000 liter fish tank so we could roughly fit round about 40 fish into this tank here now you'll see a lot of DIY aquaponics systems made out of IBC's and there's a classic design that has three grow beds once some tank in a fish tank and in a system like that depending on how deep you cut the beds you'll probably be in the vicinity of having enough dead volume to process the waste from 35 fish so that's just to give you a bit of an idea on how many fish you can grow out in your small little backyard system now obviously we need a pump in the system it's basically the heart it's moving all the water around the system now in a small little three bed IBC job' if you're going to knock up one of them you're pretty much we're looking at a pump that's going to move around about 3,500 litres an hour minimum I'd prefer to go up to around about four and a half thousand to five thousand liters the reason being is you want the water in the fish tank turned over at least one and a half times an hour I prefer twice an hour and you need enough flow rate to not only do that but also deliver the water out to the grow beds if you've got two configured like ours in a split flow configuration and not only that there will be a lot of flow lost due to friction and head height so what that means is the water flowing through these pipes going through the different sections different fittings and also they're the actual elevation the water needs to be pumped to into the fish tank all takes a little bit of flow rate out of the water so I'm getting around about 2,000 liters an hour at the moment through here with a 3,500 litre an hour pump that little chubby down there plus I'm getting at an adequate flow rate to run to grow beds I think if I was to add another grow bed onto the system I would definitely need to go up to a 4000 litre an hour pump so definitely something you need to consider when you're starting your system out the size of the pump as to what brand to recommend and the exact flow rate it's a bit hard to do that and there's so many different brands out there and it's hard to say what's available in your neck of the woods but for you folks in Australia and I think in America Jay bow and son son at two reliable small system pumps and I've also had pretty good success with the recency line but I don't know if that range is available anymore now with the pump we also need to think about our hose work and pipe work hose work is fine as long as it's UV stabilized food-grade and has a fairly smooth ball and you can see ridges on the outside of this hose work here but it is fairly smooth on the inside now from the pump I would recommend that you stick with the maximum size fitting that is built into the pump itself this one here is a 25 mil I've had other pumps that go all the way up to a 40 mil or an inch and a half I'd pretty much will stick with what they have run that pipe work out as close as you came to the fish tank and then take it down in size at that point if you need to bring it down a little bit now as for the drain pipe that is taking water out just via gravity I like to stick with a 50 mil or 2 inch drain line just because it's got a nice large ball and it takes a fair bit to obstruct it if there's ever any issues with the flow rate I've also found - with my 2000 litre or roughly 500 gallons ish an hour flow rate I don't get very many sediments and depositing out in this two-inch line now if I was to UM decrease my flow rate to maybe 1500 liters an hour I might consider going down to an inch and a half or a 40 mil line but I find you know even with that flow rate a two inch or a fifty mil line carries the flow rather nicely one thing to consider though is to make all your bends and curves sweeping so with this pressure line we don't have sweeping curves so I've made up a dual forty-five fitting there just so the water isn't rushing out hitting a 90 degree angle and then having to flow downwards this nice gentle curve just makes the flow rate a little bit easier I've done the same down the bottom and I've also used forty fives over here as well I mean on drain fittings like down in there ninety degrees are fine but generally speaking we're just after nice soft gentle curves in our pipe work so the flow isn't impeded too much so I also like to have a dedicated air line in my fish tank and what those bubbles are doing is coming up to the surface breaking the surface tension and letting a lot of oxygen dissolve into the water not necessarily through the bubbles themselves even though a little bit is transferred but you really do need a dedicated airline in an aquaponic system I've had so many people tell me that they were just allowing the water to splash into the fish tank themselves from the sump pump and relying on that to dissolve a lot of oxygen into the water but as soon as their little pump while that one down in there that is flowing water into the fish tank fails what ends up happening is you're getting no dissolved oxygen in there for the fish and you will end up with a load of dead fish pump failures can happen because you know by a pump can burn out for a blackout of sorts and then there's no air getting in for the fish and yeah it doesn't take long for them to expire I do think every system needs a dedicated backup air supply especially if you're in an area that has a lot of blackouts little backup air systems running on DC power are pretty easy to build yourself and you can check out that little clip up there if you want to see how I've knocked ours together I also think it's a good idea to have solids filtration on an aquaponic system if you have a lot of solids go directly out into the grow beds themselves what can happen is they can build up over time and if the water exchange isn't frequent enough or there's not a lot of oxygen getting down there you can end up with anaerobic zones and that can lead to all sorts of things you could pH can shoot through the roof you can have denitrification meaning nitrite is released back into the system which is extremely toxic to the fish so I do think it is a good idea to take the solids out some people believe that you're taking the nutrients out of the system I can assure you folks there is a lot of other nutrients other than just ammonia suspended in the water itself as it goes through the system so you won't be starving your plants as long as you're feeding the fish enough now this little filter job' here is called a radial flow settler I haven't got a clip on its build just yet there is one in the works oh yeah subscribe if you want hit the little button down there and then pound on the bell icon and once it's posted you will be able to catch that one the way this radial flow settler and others works is the solids are picked up from the base of the fish tanks Russell is lifting outlet they flow through the all of the radial flow settler they travel up a standpipe that disperses the water and the solids into a stilling well as the water travels down the stilling well it passes under the bottom edge of velocity of the water slows and that allows any of the solids that are in there to precipitate out onto the bottom of the filter where we can extract it at a later time using a little valve like this now on our radial flow setup you can see we have the outlet coming in and out into a another filter this is basically a drum with a series of holes in the bottom filled with shea cloth that picks up the fine solids of the radial flows settler misses and I can pull out that drum and wash it out later and you will notice there are some solids on the floor of the sump tank there but the majority of them are bits of clay dust from the media that went into the bed that couldn't be washed out with maybe just a little bit of oil other solids that came in from the other aquaponic system as all this clay is recycled from our old unit and just while we're looking at the media here you don't need to go with these clay balls they can be rather expensive depending on where you live especially here in Australia at the moment with the fall and exchange rate rocks as long as there's no carbonates in the rocks something you can check with a simple vinegar test and you should be right to use them the vinegar test is basically you dropped some rocks into some white vinegar and you just keep an eye out for streams of little bubbles if there are streams of little bubbles that's a good indication that this and carbonates in the media and you don't want them in the grow bed basically what can happen is over time the falling pH of the aquaponics water can break down the those carbonate base rocks and raise your alkalinity and pH up so that can be a bit of an issue there are other mediums you can use as well like expanded shale for your folks in the States I love a rock art it's called scoria or over here in Australia and as you can see from down in there it is a good idea to try and get as much of the dust out as you can you might find you've got very cloudy water for the first day or two but it will generally unsettle down another point just with this clay media in particular it does tend to float until all the little nooks and crannies get saturated with water so that's another common question I see pop up my clay is floating just give it a couple of days and may take up to a week or two depending on the brand and how I'm hot it was fired when it was made but yeah it will eventually soak up the water and settle down in your grow beds so once you have all your components hooked together and the water flowing through the system it's time to start thinking about cycling the system and as I mentioned before that's got to do with setting up the nitrogen cycle within the system and the easiest way to do that is to add an ammonia source to the fish tank and let it flow through the system so you can get the nitrifying bacteria to colonize the grow beds and start the process off now to do that you are going to need another essential bit of kit and that is a test kit that measures not only pH but also ammonia nitrite and nitrate so you can track the progress of your cycling process now I won't get into that too much here you can check out this little clip up there one I've already posted on the cycling process but that is pretty much for the next step before you add fish into the system and as you can see I've already got plants growing in here now it's fine to pop them in straightaway as soon as you start cycling obviously they're not going to be getting a great deal of nutrients but what you can do is add in a little bit of seaweed based liquid fertilizer or maybe powdered kelp fertilizer if that's what you've got and that will add a few more nutrients into the system just to get your plant kicked off but please don't plan out your grow beds fully straight off the bat if you're only adding in a small amount of ammonia it's going to take a while for the cycling process to i'm kick in and make a plan available nitrate so it is suggested that maybe only plan out a couple of little plants I started off with a Punnett of lettuce just small little seedlings and I had a couple of volunteer Warragul greens in there and just due to a bit of a mishap I've ended up with a load of ammonia in there so they're looking nice and healthy at the moment but yeah don't plan out your grow bed straightaway so just to give you a bit of an example so you have thirty fingerlings weighing 15 grams each they're only receiving enough feed to sustain about one meter by one meter or one yard by one yard of greens and greens aren't a very nutrient demanding plant generally speaking so there's only a all amount of nutrient going in there and if you were to plant out all your bed space with greens and tomatoes and peppers or capsicum they definitely would end up being very malnourished looking sad plant and not very productive whatsoever so even when you start out your system don't go big straight out of the gate just plant in a few small plants and then monitor the nitrate with your testing equipment and then add in more plants as you go and in no time flat you'll have a system full of luscious green veggies so it's just spoken about fingerlings I suppose we should talk about fish now obviously you've got a Taylor the fish that you want to grow to your climate as well as the legalities there's one fish species that everyone likes to grow overseas tilapia we can't grow them at all here in Australia because they are noxious pests I'm not too worried about that we have some great local native fish we can grow and so you look into the legalities and then look into what sort of climate you have and what fish suit that climate now we're in the subtropics so there's no point at all even through winter to have trout growing in our system here likewise I would not be running barramundi if I lived in an area that had a hard freeze through winter because you're just not going to get a long enough growing season to get those fish out of the water temperature they require so I suggest you look at what's provided by the local fish hatcheries bring them up have a bit of a chat to them tell them what you're doing tell them you're one of those crazy nuts trying to grow veggies using fish and they'll probably have a suggestion of a variety fish that you could grow in your area they're not only that they're going to be a very useful source of information when it comes to the feeding rate needed for your new fingerlings as they go into the system and also give you some pointers on how long it should take for them to grow from a fingerling stage all the way through to harvest there's sort of questions you can ask those folks at the hatcheries pick their brains and see what they can give you a bit of a hand with so that's pretty much well it isn't it Lizzie dog I better get to doing a bit of a test one a test the nitrates again and also the pH and I need to pop some more fish feed in just to keep the nutrients flowing for those plants until we get some fish in here just a bit of a heads up two there will be a clip coming as I'm turned on the radial flow settler and a few other clips looking at different aspects on growing with aquaponics so keep an eye out for that if you're interested in learning more now don't forget you also need to hit that subscribe button down there and pound on the bill icon if you want to be brought along for any future clips that I post on aquaponics I'm also do other bits and pieces here in the backyard farm I've started to grow mushrooms again and we're on our way to having a sizeable soil veggie patch again as well so you know check out the other clips if you're interested in different aspects of growing in an urban environment I do need to thank those awesome folks who come along every week and check out the clips thank you very much folks great chatting to you and also thank those folks who are supporting us on the farm your own yard supporters website and the youtube membership platform thank you very much folks I will pretty much we'll leave it there though and I will see you next time I post an aquaponic or backyard farming clip Cheers all and take it easy

Channel: Rob Bob's Aquaponics & Backyard Farm

Views: 880,581

Keywords: aquaponics setup, how to aquaponics, how to build an aquaponics system, aquaponics system, aquaponics, aquaponics systems design, aquaponics australia, rob bob aquaponics, rob bobs backyard, نظام الأكوابونيك, aquaponik, ਇਕਵਾਪੋਨਿਕਸ, acuaponia, アクアポニックス, BACKYARD AQUAPONICS, practical aquaponics, DIY Aqauponics, aquaponics for beginners diy, complete overview of aquaponics

Id: 1q_MN4kZRlY

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 12 2020