Scaling down aquaponics set

Rabu, 29 Ogos 2018, 6:00 pm0

Since last update about aquaponics, where I faced problem with leaks, I tried to scale down the aquaponics set from 1000 liters of fish tank and 3 DWCs, down to where it’s financially practical for me to run it. Because to run at that capacity, I figured the budget for the fish feeds, electricity, water supply and various maintenance cost might be overwhelming when I still don’t have proper channel to sell the produces.

DWC was reduced to one bed only.

I changed the piping to use 1 inch PVC pipe because it’s easier to find the tank connector of that size, which helps prevent leaking. I also drilled another hole at the fish tank, which is lower than the first one, to reduce the amount of water and the fish which going to be grown here.

Solid filter and bio filter were changed to 5 gallon buckets. Note the drain pipe for the radial flow filter is directed outside of the sump tank, to simplify the sump tank layout.

Water from sump tank was changed to pump directly to fish tank, without any split flow, so that the high water flow will help create circular flow inside the fish tank.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work really well. This tank has bump on the its base, so the solid are stuck between those bumps which prevent solid lifting overflow to work.

And for the bio filter, 5 gallon bucket is too small, and since the K1 bio media are floating, they are blocking the pipe outlet and cause water flow to jam – water pumped into fish tank are more than water that returning to the sump tank.

Since there were too many problems with the current setup, and I ran out of my budget and time to experiment, I decided to further scale down the system, to something that more controllable, like this:

To be continued.