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Originally Posted by Worm_Farmer
I really like this! I have been wanting to try out an aquaponic setup for some time. I was considering using an above ground pool as my fish tank and having LOTS of fish. How fast do your fish reproduce? It looks as if your graven bed in on the ground the fish tank above the bed. How do you get the water to return back from the ground gravel to the fish tank?
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Thanks for the nice words
The fish reproduce fast and will overpopulate in short order if you don't account for it. The most natural and convenient way to control it is probably to stock some largemouth bass or other apex predator in there to balance the system. That's what I did. It works well, and you get some big game fish out of the deal. Doesn't require many, maybe 1 for every few hundred tilapia.
You have a good eye noting the relative heights, and how they are inverted from what is generally seen. The original plan was to have the gravel grow bed a bit higher than the fish tank, but I just ran out of energy and motivation digging the hole for the fish tank (it was the middle of winter, the ground was frozen, and I was chipping at it with a pickaxe). So I inverted the design and added a deep 'hole' in the grow bed that is close to 3' deep. The water flows through the grow bed to that hole, at which point I use an airlift to pump the water out of there up to the fish tank, where it then overflows back to the gravel. I don't recommend the inverted method, and wish I would have just put in the extra time and work to fulfill the original design.
I have experimented with above ground pools. I'm currently using 5 (a 600 gal, two 1,700 gal, and two 4,000 gal). I don't really like them, but that's skewed by the particular experiment I was running (exploring the limits of greenwater aquaculture), which was disappointing. If you hook up sufficient grow beds to them, they should work fine (once 'broken in' and cycled for a while), with the added plus that it's especially easy to set up those grow beds at waist level in that type of a system. So a user-friendly system is definitely possible via that route. I'll probably re-purpose my pools for growing that way next year.