Monthly Archives: February 2011

Aquaponics Home System – Part 15: Water Pump

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I have mounted a small shelf for the water pump inside the plant tank table. The pump has been bolted to the shelf and I’m anxious to find out how much noise the pump will make and if the structure will start vibrating.

The suction hose is mounted on the right side of the pump and the pressure hose is mounted on the top:

“Hey, the 70′s called – they want their hose back.” :-D You just gotta love the color, but I think it’s because this is the color the hoses will get after a while due to algae growing on the inside. You could choose clear plastic but you would have to use large pipe cleaners to keep the hoses clean and clear.

The suction hose is going to dip one end into the fish tank:

At the moment we’re considering a type of fish that likes to dig into sand to find food but I don’t want to get sand into the pump. By placing the suction hose end in the very top I hope I can avoid this and the sand will stay in the lower half of the tank. I’ll have to fill up the fish tank completely to do a water flow test though.

The plant tank inlet is supposed to consist of a pipe assembly but I haven’t found a way to connect the green pressure hose to the pipes so for now I’m just dumping one end of the hose into the end of the plant tank:

There’s probably a special PVC fitting designed to connect the two but since this is the only thing I would be ordering at the online supplier their shipping cost would be way to high compared to what I would be receiving. It doesn’t matter if I buy a tiny PVC fitting or a whole box full of them, the shipping would be the same in this case. So I’m waiting to see if I need anything else from that shop or else the plant tank inlet will just stay like this.

This last one is a closeup of the Eheim 1260 water pump, or power drive, ready to rumble:

The hoses are actually too long but I don’t want to cut off the extra length yet because I want to be able to make adjustments to the plant tank inlet depth and the fish tank suction depth.

Free Trellis Plans

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If you want to grow climbing beans or cucumbers this year you might want to check out my ebook about trellises, that I’m giving away for free. It’s 22 pages with a lot of pictures to get ideas from – just check out the right sidebar to find the sign up form. In case you’re reading my blog through a RSS-reader you’ll have to go to my blog happyfarming.com and look in the right sidebar where you can sign up. I’ll send you the download link right away. You’ll also be signed up for my email newsletter, but if you don’t want that just click unsubscribe after you have found the download link.

Aquaponics Home System – Part 14: Drain

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The water circulation system is made from PVC pipes and fittings, that are held together with glue, or PVC cement:

On the left above is a can of special PVC cleaner. It smells awful when applied so I had to open a window to keep my braincells from dying. It’s so strong that it actually dissolves a thin layer on the surface of the PVC, which helps the glue get an even better grip.

The glue bottle comes with a useful brush in the lid to make it easy to apply the glue to the PVC pipes. The glue is applied to both items before assembly:

This is the feeding pipe for the plant tank:

I have connected a short pipe to take the inlet stream below the water surface in order to keep the system quiet, but if noise wasn’t a problem it’s probably best to let the water splash out of the fitting to pick up as much oxygen as possible.

In the other end of the plant tank I have mounted a stand pipe to raise the water level in the tank up to a certain height. The reason for the small holes in the top is to make sure that the floating mats won’t block the drain:

The drain goes through a hole in the bottom of the plant tank and takes a turn to the left:

and the return water flows into the far end of the fish tank:

The hard part of making this drain, besides looking out for whatever braincells I had left (PVC cleaner and glue), was to assemble each PVC part in the correct position before the glue locked the parts together completely – which was about 10 seconds :-D

Next up is the mounting of the water pump.