so after reading this forum i have seen almost no mention of aquaponics, and as i know many of you don't want to have to visit grow stores this is a great way to grow. it is basically hydroponics ut instead of using chen nutes you have a resivour with live fish in it, the water is pumped up through a grow bed and drains back into the res. all you have to do is feed the fish and sit back and enjoy some quality organic smoke. the system is very flexable and can be built with some pvc piping a fish tank or rubbermade tote some gravel and a light or two all of which you don't have to get at a grow store. i have a system like this going right now however i am growing veggies. but its the same thing and i have used the same system to grow other stuff, its no sweat. if you guys have any questions feel free to ask
ya wana make an ms pain to visualize this system, sounds great, this is what i hope to do, but a pic would be frikin sweet
cool, i was thinkin more like 3, 5 gal buckets, middle one resivior. (sp) and make a system fitting that. btw what are u growing there.
this is a pic of my more recent system, my old one was mostly lettuce and a couple of toms, this is one with less lettuce and more toms its an old pic its alot more over grown but u can get an idea of how the water flows
the thing with this kinda system is i don't know if ur familur with the nitrogen cycle but what happens is the fish poop out amonia, there is bacteria that convert the amonia to no2 and different bacteria that convert no2 to no3 which is basically plant food. now fish poo has alot oh N and P but is lacking in K so what i do is add a lil green sand to the tank and it smooths things out. you need to have a good layer of gravel that stays wet to keep the bacteria alive and the water needs to flow through the gravel. so if you had a ebb and flow system with a growbed full of gravel or hydroton and or any other kind of media. when the water returns back to the tank it is clean so there is no need for water changes, and in an aquarium the water tends to go down in ph and in hydropinics it tends to go up so it will balance its self some where between 7 and 7.5 at least mine dose. and to help as a buffer you can add some crushed coral. other than that you just feed the fish. another thing is that the system takes time to build up bacteria so u can;t just go out and start right away after you have the system going it takes like a month to be cycled completelt and then you can get a decient amount of fish and put in plants. and after like 6 months you will get an explosing in growth from the decaying fish poo and extra life that takes hold. this is the perfect symbiotic system. as for nutes the more u feed the fish the more the plants grow its that simple. and you don't have to use fish u can use crawfish turtles frogs any kinda aquatic animal that poops really. ill add more if i can think of it
i first started using this kinda system to grow cannabis, i had a small 40 gallon fish tank and 2 growbeds in a closet and it worked great, i had it setup so one growbed was in the back part in a 12 12light cycle and another one was in 24 hrs of light, all plants growing out of the same res. i used 8 of those t5 shop light bulbes all in a fixture i built, and a 400 watt hps in the back.
I have two systems going right now. One has the fish inside the res. and the other is way more complex. Both require next to nothing for care and the later seems to produce more. The more complex system is made up of a full Aquarium (55 gal) with an overflow to a sump filter below. I built the whole system and I mean all of it. I cut the glass, built the stand, designed the sump filter, and more important, added the homemade areoponics setup. The first live in the aquarium (1' Plecostomus, 5 "Walking Catfish) they eat a lot of goldfish, beef heart, chicken, worms, and my fingers when I'm not careful in the tank. Well they poop and such and this is broke down in a few places in the system. There is the gravel in their tank which hits it first. Then there is the sump filter with a second dead water type bio-filter which is just an area with very low water flow and some bio-material ( broke up "egg crate" ( square holed plastic for drop ceilings ) for the beneficial bacteria to grow. I have also used plastic bottle caps with good results. The water goes over a small waterfall in the sump for extra aeration. This area of the sump has a heater, pump to pump water back to the tank. It is important that the feed pipe for the aquarium either exits at the top of the tank or that the pipe goes to the top and uturns back down with a hole near the water line. This is so in the event of a power outage that the pipe doesn't attempt to siphon the tank dry. This has an unpleasant effect of overflowing the sump all over the floor. Now the Areoponics box is made of 2 totes, one main reservoir that sits on the BOTTOM of a cabinet. There is a 1/2" hose going from about 5" up form the bottom to the same area of the sump in the Aquarium setup as the pump and heater. There is a stand in the tote to hold the other tote up off the bottom about 10". The second tote sits on this and has an inlet on one end with a hose coming from a second pump in that same area of the Main aquarium setup as the other pump, heater, etc. This and the previous hose are the only two hoses going between the components. I recommend using some sort of tape to cover both hoses as light hitting them tend to grow lots of algae in them. The other end of the tote has a large drain to allow the excess to drain to the bigger bottom tote which returns to the main aquarium setup by way of the first hose mentioned. Inside the top tote is a manifold which moves nut. Rich water to 12 mister nozzles that spray up at plant roots. The lid is hinged (not mandatory but convenient) and it has 12 holes in it for plant sites. The plants sit in net pots with NO medium. They have a neoprene sleeve that holds the stem of the plant. The problems I have encountered... 1. Clogging misters, solved with better more expensive misters (Home Depot ones clog easy the better ones don't go through a hole they spray on a cone that makes it a mist) 2. Weed is acid loving and early on it was hard to keep nitrates going in with a PH of 7 resulting in very yellow plants, semi solved buy finding acid loving fish as they tend to balance at a lower PH. 3. Patience for plant growth, solved by... well not really but look up.... it grows way faster here than in soil... I will work on some pictures of both systems soon with more in depth explanations and maybe a step by step construction how 2