Figure 41. Submersible Water Heater
4.3.5 Water Circulation
The aquaponic system requires that the water circulates constantly in the system. In order to complete
the cycle we will need water pumps to pump the water in the growing beds. The return water will flow
in the fish tanks by gravity.
The factors to take in consideration we choose a pump are the GPH (gallon per hour) rating of the pump
and the static head. Gallon per hour is the amount in gallons that the pump can deliver in an hour. The
static head is the maximum high the pump can deliver it. The relation between these two properties is
shown in appendix D.
According to brightagrotech.com, a professional aquaponics website we need to circulate the water in
the system every two hours. There is a lot of flexibility but for starting systems that what they
recommend. For design purpose and actually practical implementation we did consider a portion of
water from our tank. The amount we take is 100gall of water. The reason why we do that is that in this
case I better if we use several pumps instead of only one that can deliver for the entire 1500 gallon
amount. That is impractical because we have a really small scale system for that powerful pump. We to
have to take in account that that kind of pump will have to deliver around 750 gallons per hour. The
piping involved will be outside of the scope of our system and will need a more professional crew to
install them. The system will completely rely on that pump and it is not going to be modular. Also the
risk of disaster is great due to the high pressure that pump will have on its primary pipe. Going back to
our 100 gallon assumption we will need around 15, 50 GPS rating pumps to circulate the water around
efficiently. Table 22 shows all the pump options