Over the last two days we have converted our original Homestead Kit over to CHOP system.
The Homestead Kit has been faithfully producing fish and veggies for over 3 years
and has been the experimental test bed for many an aquaponics adventure.
I have been fed up with the difficulties experienced with the use of float switches and timers.
CHOP is much more reliable and foolproof.
In order to change over we needed to make some sumps that would just slide under the
existing grow beds and have enough capacity to deal with the volume of water dumped by the auto siphon on each cycle.
I was gently “pushed” into making these sumps by Dave McPherson.
Dave wanted to convert his Homestead to CHOP for all the same reasons as stated above.





The new sump ready to slide under the 585 ltr bed.
The sumps are marine Grade fiber glass 300 ltr capacity.





The remaining three sumps.

We needed one sump for each grow bed.
The sump is 300 ltr capacity and each grow bed dumps approx 170 ltrs on each cycle.
We wanted to be sure that there is enough capacity to hold the individual dump and some more.
The sump needs to have some water in the bottom so that the pump will continue to work.





New pipework.


There was a lot of pipework to be done, and the hard part…digging the trenches for the pipes.
There is the gravity delivery pipes bringing water from the fish tank to each grow bed by gravity.
There is the positive pressure return pipes to bring the water from the sumps back to the fish tank.
Balancing pipes join the sumps to each other.
We have employed two return pumps for this system in order to insure some redundancy.
The pumps are 3500 lph each burning 40 watts of mains power and running 24/7 It would work with just one pump,
but as we have disturbed the gravel grow beds and filled the system directly from the dam,
the water is really dirty, so we want some good vigorous circulation for the next week to clean it up.





Dug out the old upstand in each bed to install the auto siphon devices.


You will notice that we had to remove the old slow trickle upstand and replace it with an auto siphon device in each bed.
This required a bit of shovelling of the gravel.
Notice the gravel. More that 3 years of continuous operation and no blockage.
A good deal of solids can be seen towards the bottom of the gravel column, but no hint of blockage or poor water flow through the gravel.





A view of the next bed dug out to install the auto siphon upstand.


here is still some work to be done tidying up the greenhouse, re planting the grow beds where we dug up the ends.
I still need to fit an auto top-up valve to one of the sumps to keep the system automatically topped up from my 2300 ltr reserve water tank.
I have it connected to the DUO system and it is great not to have to worry about topping up the system.

Having now moved all my systems to CHOP there is no turning back.
The old way of having two pumps, one in the fish tank and one in the sump, timers and / or float switches in ancient
stuff.

All our manufactured systems operate on the CHOP principle.

CHOP animation