Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Well hello all, I know this is the member system forum, but I'm lazy, so I'm including my intro as well. If you don't care, feel free to skip down! My name is Tim and I am most certainly a newbie in this arena. I first got into the whole hydro/aqua game about two months ago, and my wife has hardly seen or heard from me since! I must admit, it is all very addicting. I started with Hydroponics and was very quickly intrigued by Aquaponics. I now am running two setups, one indoor hydro in my garage, and another indoor Aqua in my unused dining room. Both are fairly small for the moment, but as I become more experienced and amass more equipment, I know for a fact that will change. Now onto the build!

My Aquaponics setup is a fairly rudimentary rig, it's nothing more than a 55 gallon acrylic fish tank with a ten or fifteen gallon concrete mixing tub on top for the grow bed.



The bed is filled with hydroton (though I did have a hellish few days with perlite...) and is drained with a bell siphon. Suspended above the grow bed is a 150 watt HPS light (just got that yesterday! ).



I'm not yet going for the fish production side of things as I'm trying to learn some of the ins and outs first, so my tank just has as assortment of goldfish. Mind you, two of them are about six or seven inches long and two or three inches wide! I've been dealing with the usual things like cycling the water and ammonia spikes, but so far nothing catastrophic. I haven't decided whether or not I will be running it 24/7 or on a schedule, but for the moment it is on a timer to pump 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off between 5 am and 9 pm and then off at night (with two or three cycles thrown in to avoid stagnation at night). I just barely started sprouting some things in the grow bed. So far I only have romaine lettuce that is actually growing, but there are several other seeds being sprouted in rock-wool in my mini greenhouse.



I did something a little different from what I have seen so far, and that is I included the aquarium rocks at the bottom of the fish tank. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. I added them because I wanted to establish bacteria as quickly as possible, and I figured the more places there were to colonize, the better. I know the bio-filter is supposed to be the grow bed, so I'm not sure if having the rocks below is taking away from the grow bed, or if it doesn't make a difference (so feel free to let me know!)

That pretty much sums up my system so far, I'll fill you all in as it progresses. I would also appreciate any tips or suggestions for it, as I'm new and looking to learn as much as possible. Thanks!

If you will pull the filter out of your aquarium filter and squeeze that nasty muck into your growbeds it will greatly speed up your cycling. Also, with you having a growbed, you should turn off that aquarium filter and let the growbed do the job for you. (You are catching a lot of the stuff your GB needs in that filter and throwing it away)

Actually, the filter is quite deceiving, it's not actually running. I had it in the tank when the grow bed wasn't yet finished or installed, but now it's just taking up space on the side of my tank XD. Thanks for the tip though!

Welcome to the forum by the way!

Well thank you, good sir.