We started the apartment search process and I think we may have found a great place but not sure when we will get to make our move.  The apartment has a huge (and I do mean huge) wrap around patio with a fence around it and if I can get an apartment where that patio faces south we will be all set for the Aquaponics system of my dreams.

I will put plastic tubs along the edge of the patio and put trout and perch fingerlings in them.  Then will rig them up with a two tiered system of grow beds with gravity drip and a pump in each fish tub.  This way I can grow root crops also.  Then I will hang the window farm in the space above those grow beds all the way from the top of the patio roof.  Could be about 6-8 bottles each row and probably 15 rows.  I will pump the water clear to the top of the windowfarm and let it drip through the grow beds and back into the fishtubs.  I can hang plastic around the whole thing in the winter to make a greenhouse.

So what have I missed and what problems do you all forsee with this plan.

I would appreciate your feedback so I can set this all up with not too many redo steps.  Also does anyone have a reliable ratio number for fish to plants and can you just start small and grow slowly to keep it balanced, or is that exactly the worst thing to do?

Thanks for your input.

Pam

Sorry to be bombarding you with these pictures, if you’re uninterested.

So, I’m just a few days away from the science fair, and I’m already disappointed in how rigourous I was not.  If I do this for next year, I’ve got some ideas of how to really science this up.

That having been said, I’ve got the

This pea blossom is in one of the 2 "just fish water" columns.

This pea blossom is in the "CO2" column.

first blossoms from my pea plants!

The first pic, you can’t really see the blossom, but it’s in there.  It’s the whitish ‘leaf’ right just up and left from centre.

The CO2 column has only been getting CO2 for the last 4 or 5 days, so there shouldn’t be loads of difference yet, even if I’m getting a meaningful amount in there.

How am I putting CO2 into this column of plants, you ask?

Read on…

If you have an aquarium that’s heavily planted with real plants, you have a nice, natural support to your filtration.  Unfortunately, the heavier the plant load, the more you run up against a limit on the plants’ growth – the amount of available CO2 in the water.  Since the concentration of CO2 will be roughly equivalent to that in the atmosphere, since the fish are not as great producer of CO2 as land animals, CO2 supplementation helps encourage plant growth.  Now you can spend LOADS of cash on a CO2 canister with all the bells and whistles ($00s of dollars) or you can have some soda pop, and DIY a CO2 generator.

2 cups of brown sugar, spooned oh-so-slowly into a pop bottle

drill a hole 1/16" smaller than the outer diameter of the airline. Cut the airline at an angle to make threading easier. Once you've got it in, hot glue a seal on both sides of the cap.

1 tsp of quick yeast (you can go as high as 1 tbsp, some say) and 1 litre of water. Don't slop the yeast on the sides of the bottle, it won't do much good there.

One nice thing about doing this instead for hydroponics instead of for an aquarium is that for the latter you need a fancy diffuser (there are, of course, DIY options).

So I just have the other end of the CO2 airline going into the top of the bag that’s around one of my plant columns.  Simple.

So, my experiment was ‘is fish water as  good as commercial hydroponics fertilizer’.  There are a few caveats to my investigation.  #1 is that I’m not stocking at true Aquaponics densities.  They fill their tanks to the gills (heh.  Get it?  To the gills.  It’s about fish) and so have a much higher nitrogen level than I have.   They would also spread this over many more plants than I am.  There’s a lot of variables, is what I’m saying.  At any rate, here’s a few examples of the growth.

taken March 23rd

taken April 3rd

Not a bad amount of growth for… what, 12 days?

That’s it for tonight. Thanks for your interest, and have a good night. Good luck with your veggies.

So, she’s running a beaut now.  I’ve got 3 columns of fish water running, and 1 of retail nutrient solution (I can get the name if you care.

I germinated seeds about 3 weeks ago, and now I’ve got all four columns running 2 very substantial bean plants each (last pics are from 10 days ago.  I’m afraid to look in the silver cube) and a mediocre pea plant.

I still haven’t put in the CO2 doping yet.  TOmorrow?  So.. .

That's aluminized plastic (cheap emergency heat blanket) around the frame. Keeps the light nice and bright inside.

Tired…

I’ll type more about what you’re looking at soon.  Promise!  I’ve just been putting this off so long I have to do something.

If this is in the wrong space, let me know, and I’ll publish further steps of construction somewhere else.

I had a productive weekend, and things worked the way they should have.  I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but there you go.  That’s doing things for the first time for you.  You learn all sorts of stuff about unrealistic expectations. Read the rest of this entry →

One year and 3 months ago I started fishkeeping as a Phase 1 of trying to do home Aquaponics, inspired by the work of the people that did the Ark project out of (I think) Rhode Island (can’t find it now).

Of course, I thought I was real smart, and the only one to do this.

Then I saw the Windowfarms thing, and found this community and was a little dejected I wasn’t as smrt as I thought.

Regardless, I got into fishkeeping in a fairly big way, and have a number of beautiful tanks I just love watching.  I had totally forgotten about the aquaponics side of my plan until I heard about a science fair for adults (complete with category for best Volcano) coming in April.  So I quickly geared up to prepare an experiment for Aquaponics.  I’m just using the fish water for the hydroponic side, not looking to eat the fish, so I’m calling this AquaponicsLite.  I’ve got almost all of my equipment and materials, tonight I’ll be getting the last of the wood to set up the plant stand, and then I’ll be good to go.

The experiment is monitoring electrical usage to see how cost/energy efficient the process is.  I won’t be using sunlight because I’ll also be monitoring quality of growth given 3 variables.

• Control group of hydroponics, bagged to maintain humidity
• Hydroponics with CO2 supplementation
• Soil
• One unbagged to see effects of no humidity control.

So, I’ve gotten a few pictures, but I’ll get more once I’ve finished the set up and it’s all there in it’s magical glory.  I’m posting this here to get things started.

BTW: running a fish tank with heater, 2 t5HO lights and 2 HOB filters for a week  costs ~$1.50 at $0.0064/kwH.

So excited to find this group!

I’ve put together a three bottle system for my daughter’s room that uses an aquarium as the reservoir. For the actual farm as complete, I used under $25 worth of new parts:

• 3 CVS 1.5L Water Bottles (on sale for 3/$2)
• 10 ft 1/4″ OD tubing ($5)
• 1 ft 1/4″ ID tubing ($5 for the 10 ft length - I have excess left…)
• Air pump ($10 at the hydroponics store)
• 5 gal hexagonal Aquarium with under-gravel filter (free, was en route to be taken out to the trash)
• 2 goldfish ($1 since my daughter hand-picked, else $0.10 each)
• spraypaint (had on hand – painted each one black first, then oversprayed the black with white primer)
• 3 netpots (used the 3.75″ ones, $0.50 each from the hydroponics store)
• 1 empty children’s liquid tylenol bottle (free)
• Expanded clay balls ($12.99 for the bag at the hydroponics store, maybe used $1 worth for this setup)
• 18″ black cord (had on hand)
• 1 nail (had on hand)
• 2 ball inflation needles (had on hand, just bought 10 for $4 on eBay to replace what I took and prepare for future window farms)

You’ll see in the picture (will edit tonight to include) that I also used some double-sided velcro and bamboo stuff, but I consider that primarily decorative so didn’t include it in the cost. But I haven’t yet put in the one way doohickey to prevent water siphoning back to the pump, so that will be another couple of dollars.

I cut two rectangular holes in each bottle, which will allow two plants per bottle and made it easy to drill the 1″ hole in the bottom of the bottle. I could have gotten by with a 1″ drillbit and a 1/4″ drill bit. For finishing the holes in the sides of the bottles, I used a hole punch so the corners would be neat (and not “tear”) and regular scissors to make the rest of the cuts. The only other tool I needed was a tiny screwdriver, which I used to poke the holes for the ball needles.

I think I could have drilled the 1″ holes freehand, but I rigged up a wood jig that supported the bottle – another picture to add tonight… I also fastened the “silencer” bottle on the top of the group the same way the other bottles are fastened together. The “silencer” quiets any noise from the water popping out the top of the system, and creats a “finial” effect that is esthetically pleasing. A nearly-vertical nail in the window frame and a piece of cording around the neck of the “silencer” are used to support the load of the system.

For the drip, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the standard instructions. But I liked the description where folks used the ball needles to inject water into forced air, rather than forced air into water. So I did it that way, stuffing the tubing down into the cylinder coming up from the under-gravel filter.  The system gets a good drip on a continual basis and it’s no more noisy than a regular aquarium set-up would be.

I’ve transplanted some basil and parsley into the two top bottles and plan to put strawberry plants in the lowest bottle.

In the mean time I’ve got some okra, lettuce, and cherry tomato seeds germinating in rock wool for a future window farm in my other kid’s bedroom…

Finally sufficiently done with our aquaponic windowfarm to post a youtube tour of our set-up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zq7T6QNrc4

It’s taken a bit of investment to get to this point, but I think I could pull one of these together for $40 (a bit more because of the fish aspect), and last weekend we gave one of these as a birthday gift to one of my pre-teen’s friends.

I’ve got two kids with good windows for this, so will post another video when I get the second windowfarm up and running.

Innovations:

1. Used an alternative method to perform the airlift, based on a post I saw here – my lift uses the ball inflation needles to inject water into the air hose instead of the other way around.
2. I use the “silencer” at the top of the drip line to support the weight of the assembly. It serves a decorative purpose (finial) and makes it crazy easy to support the whole assembly from a single near-vertical nail in the window casing. I don’t need to use any other supports given the exact 1″ hole I was able to drill into the bottom of each bottle.
3. I used double-sided velcro strips to fasten the tubing going up.
4. I used a 1/4″ OD tubing (short length, angle cut on exit) to control the drip. Don’t actually know if that’s a great idea, but I didn’t want the water splashing the windows and some plants supposedly don’t like getting watered “directly.”
5. I just use 1/4″ OD tubing from the lowest bottle to guide the return water back to the fish tank.
6. I use one of the variable control air splitters to ensure both the air lift and the air stone get enough air pressure.
7. I used a hole punch to round the corners of each “grow hole,” of which I cut 2 in each bottle. The “square” holes allowed me to get a jig into the bottles for a nice drilling support, so getting the 1″ holes drilled in the bottom of the bottles was a breeze.

We’ll see in a few weeks whether some of these “innovations” were really dumb ideas…

I recorded a brief video to document my experiment with an airlift system.

If the video doesn’t show up (the preview certainly isn’t showing it), then you can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xkUsAlM_0

Okay, as requested by Britta, here’s the introduction to a piece of equipment that may provide a cheap solution to a problem that those of us who chose to use a setup featuring a comparatively powerful aquarium pump have:

How to reduce the interval to a minimum when it’s not about a steady drip, but quick flushes.

The Lucky Reptile Easy Timer doesn’t need specified switch-on times to be set – it’s enough to program an interval and the duration of the power-on time.  The shortest interval is 15mins, the shortest power-on times are a mere 15/30s.

As I haven’t got an aquaponics setup, that should be enough time for the pump to push the entire content of my reservoir through the system once.

Lucky Reptile is, as you will have guessed, a German company, but the timer is apparently also readily available in the UK. I was unable to find comparable entry-level products, quite surprising, given the number of foggers operated by lizard and orchid lovers around the world.

Mabye someone else knows of one, and can add it here!

I loved hearing the report about you on NPR today! It sounds so beautiful!

We set up a hydroponic system in our garage (which is beneath our house) this winter. We wanted to grow lettuce organically and used fish and seaweed emulsion as the nutrition in the water. However, the smell was bad enough to rise into our house and give us all sore throats. We turned off the system and gave up. What do you feed your plants? Is it organic? Does it smell? The emulsion that we used is the same stuff we use to water our potted plants in the house and also all of our starts in the spring that are also in the garage. However, in the soil, it is odorless. It was the constantly cycling water that caused so much smell. I would love to hear if there is any way around this so that we can try again next winter.