Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My friend and I are thinking about starting up a dutch bucket aquaponics system but with 5 gallon home depot buckets filled all the way with media. Do you guys think it would be necessary for us to have a separate bio-filter like a fluidized bed filter with K1 Kaldness, or do you think the media will be enough to house the needed bacteria?

Welcome to the forum

Thank You!

Whether that's enough to filter for the whole system is going to depend entirely on what it's trying to filter! How many fish are you planning to run, in what size tank, and how many buckets are you going to have?

+1

Also on how much of the media is actually getting dampened.

I'm planning on running anywhere from 8-12 buckets. About 12-18 inches of media will be dampened. Also, We are doing this as a school project, and one of the places we might be able to keep this is on the pool deck. It would be far enough from the pool where the water wouldn't get in, plus the pool room is generally very warm. I was wondering though if chlorine could get infused into the water via gas exchange. Any thoughts? Thanks so much for the responses, I really appreciate them.

I'm not sure about this but I think it could if this is in an enclosed building. It might not be enough to be a problem but I would expect the gasses to reach some sort of equilibrium between the gasses present in the liquid and the air of the building.