South West Makers

Last year I became interested in Aquaponics and how to grow "civilised" veggies. I wanted to try and make a vertical garden in my patio area so the produce would be close at hand to the kitchen and also be visible easily from the living room. (Maybe just a little bit of a slacker.)

Aquaponics is similar to hydroponics except that instead of adding nutrients, we use a natural,chemical process to turn fish waste into liquid plant food.

I also wanted to try and integrate a sensor array to integrate with my RaspPi.

After a starter setup, I built a large(ish) setup on the fence. The choice of location did cause some problems because I couldn't take up too much room onto the patio as it's the access route to the back yard for my boat and trailer.

I'll go into the process to date in another post shortly, but we did get quite a few tomatoes and herbs from the system but nothing you would call a "plate-able" fish.

Hey, thats a nice looking setup there Phillip. I would be interested in hearing about your sensor packages as you install them.

Where are your fish located, and how many do you need to produce the amount of waste for the plants?

Decided to give the backyard a cleanup and managed to move the aquaponics along a little.

I picked up a couple IBCs recently and decided to add one to the system. It wil make managing the temperature changes and fluctuations in nutrients in the system easier. At the moment I have about 100L in the system and this will add about 500l more.

Here is a photo before I reinserted the plastics tank back into the frame. It was a bit dark at that point. I'll add another photo when I get it further along. I'm following the design from the "Backyard Aquaponics" videos on Youtube, with some variations to incorporate my previous work.

seaton wrote:Where are your fish located, and how many do you need to produce the amount of waste for the plants?

The fish are stored in 2x 50l tubs at the bottom of the system. I have had up to 50 goldfish in the system but they didn't manage to produce enough waste for the entire system when it's totally full,of plants. I'm still quite new and lost quite a few fish for an unknown reason. I think the water went septic when I didn't clean the filter bucket form a couple of weeks. (Ish)

Well it seems the more water you have, the better off you will be:

Here is my original system overview before I added a 500L subtank and an IBC for the trout. These are all joined to give a total of 2500L.

Tee'd in the IBC to my existing rig. This is my 6 monthly tank - used for trout in winter and barramundi in the summer:


I have also tried horizontal strawberry towers, but gave up on that when the roots went mad and it was too hard to maintain..


I also converted our fish pond to aquaponics, and made it frog friendly.
It still works quite well even if you have a small rig like my frogponics which is around 110L:




I used a PICAXE to make a 10 minute on timer for the Pump (via a 150W inverter) for the frogponics:


The "frogponics" is a frog friendly by using 7 x Pigmi Perch that don't eat frogs eggs...

Anyway I'll post some video of the 2 IP cams for the silver perch & current trout if you want to see how it all works