Aquaponics System Build – Tanks and Plumbing

With the holiday season over it’s time to get back to building, and the rush is on to get things ready by spring. We experienced a setback in late December, a neighbors dogs got loose and killed all of our chickens. That being the case, I’ll document the process of raising them from chicks when we get new ones in February or March. I’ve also made a lot of other progress on the property, we are getting ready to start the first phase of fence and have started a couple of banana circles which I’ll show in a future post. For not, the focus is on the aquaponic system.

The system was originally going to be a three grow tank system with media beds, I’ve switched that to two media beds and one floating raft system. Last post showed setting up the pad for the system, now I’ll go through the assembly.

The Layout

First thing to be done is place the sump and tanks together. I’m starting with a simple setup, the fish tank will overflow into the grow beds, they will dump into the sump, then a pump in the sump will return the water to the fish tank. Here’s an amateurish drawing of the plumbing:

The system does not have any additional filtration at this time, I’m hoping the sump and floating raft bed act as settling tanks and I’m also using some filter material in the media beds to grab any solids. There are some system designs that are probably better than this, one uses the pump return to feed the grow beds and fish tank so each subsystem can be isolated for cleaning or maintenance. For now, this will do and I can always change it later.

The Build

First step is to lay out the sump and grow beds to get their width so I can set up supports. I wanted the grow beds to be as low as possible to get good flow from the fish tank overflow, in the end I had to raise the fish tank anyways.

Once I had the width and depth figured out it was time to put support boards on. These are 12 foot long 2×10’s.

Next, put the grow beds on.

Before getting too far, checking for leaks and testing the bell siphon.

Here’s the underside of the center tank where it dumps into the sump. Yes, it’s a little dirty but I’ll clean it all up once assembled.

The bell siphon test was successful, so I placed all the tanks and plumbed everything up.

A view of the fish tank.

Back side of the grow beds.

Here’s one of the spouts the feed the grow bed. I didn’t glue these connections so they can be adjusted or moved around as needed.

Testing everything, success!

And a final view of the raft bed.

So far everything seems to be working good. Next I’ll add the media to the grow beds, build the raft, and add aeration and a heater to the fish tank. If everything goes as planned I should be able to start planting early March. Time to start some seedlings!

Happy planting!