Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This begins my adventure in the wild outside world. All my previous systems have been indoors, hidden from the light.

So I'm starting a patio/balcony system to take advantage of the sun to get some fruiting and flowering plants.

For those of you who saw my shady plants thread, after observing the site for a bit more, it does get *some* sun. Looks to be maybe 2 hours at this point in the year. That coupled with the ambient light makes me think it'll work.

So, I spent some cash at the hardware store, and assembly will begin tomorrow!

Because I'm not sure how friendly the neighbors and property managers will be, this is going to be a small and very modular system.

The grow beds and tanks will be 5 gallon (20 liter) food grade buckets. The drains will be plumbed with 1/2" uniseals, joined together to a common pvc loop-style siphon. I got some red lava rock for the medium because I thought it looked better than river gravel .

I'll be starting with humonia cycling, and this may become a straight peeponic system. I haven't decided yet.

The system will be simple tank <-> GB system. I considered CHIFT PIST, but decided it added complexity of space and plumbing I don't need for such a small system.

I got seeds for beefsteak tomatoes, radish, sugar snap peas, mixed capsicum, green onion (to repel bugs), and petite carrots. I have no idea if these will really grow with the amount of light I have, but I'm going to try! I'm looking forward to having a living screen from the trained vines.

Im sure you will be pleased with the growth when you get some more sun on the plants!

Good luck !!!

Benefit if you leave it pee ponic, there is no worry about water fluctuating in the "tank" and there is somewhat less in the way of solids build up when you are not adding fish food or fish poop into the fish tank.

I once managed to grow some cucumber plants in containers on a very shady patio, off season even. They were pretty sad looking plants but we did get to eat about two very small cucumbers off the vines. It is always worth a try to use what you got, if nothing else, you gain experience.

Both points are true. the water fluctuation is the main reason I'm learning towards pee ponic

System is assembled !

Pump is bubbling away, loop siphon works like a charm, dosed with humonia. I know TCLynx likes to age the humonia to convert to ammonia and kill all the badies, but I'm pretty certain humonia contains the nitrobacter and such as well. So I'm going with the competition model and adding fresh humonia.

I got a new video camera as a toy, so I've been documenting the process for a soon-to-be blog targeted towards locals interested in being green, but I'll put up a link here when it's ready.

Pics soon.

What were the water readings before dosing? If you took any.

Sorry, didn't take any.

Finally got my master test kit since I lost my old one. My pH is 8.2! Of course, this is causing lockout and it's no wonder my seedlings burnt up . Peas are still going strong, so I guess they like the alkaline.

Ammonia is 4.0, so I'm going to hold off on hummonia dosing (had been doing 100mL per day) until that processes.

Let's hear it for fishless cycling!

go fisheless cycle

I did a pH test on my tap water and my tap water with lava rock.

After leaving them for a day, tap water measures 7.4. Tap water with lava rock measures 8.0, and I could see that the rock was dissolving a bit in the water.

So... I need to replace my media . Fortunately, it's a tiny system, and only has 10 gallons of media. I guess I will get some river gravel.

I ended up with a major overhaul. The media has been replaced with pea gravel.

The siphon was operating too fast, so I downsized it. The 3/8" tubing had too much inner-wall resistance to start the siphon without being banged about. So... I switched to a timer with standpipe. 15 min on and 45 min off. Thanks to TCLynx for posting the useful diagrams thread .

So, after all this, I have all new water and all new gravel. As this is going to be a peeponics system, at least initially, I'll be testing cycling parameters using fresh hummonia instead of aged hummonia. The idea is that the bacterial mix that occurs naturally in hummonia are good for composting, so they should also be good for grow beds.

Results will be posted over time.

Just don't overdose. A dribble per day should do it. Remember that the fresh humonia will not show up as ammonia on the test kit right away (delayed reaction while the enzymes and such convert the urea into ammonia.) Too much ammonia can burn your plants far more than a simple high pH. There are lots of good minerals in lava rock so I hope you kept what you removed from this system for use somewhere. I actually have used quite a lot of red lava rock in my system, now that it has been running for a while, pH has come down even with the system chock full of shells.

The lava rock is sitting in bags that are easily accessible. I may throw some in the FT for the dust when everything settles down.

So I've left the system running with the new water and the new gravel for about 2 weeks now. I took my first readings, and found the strangest thing:

pH: 7.9
NH3: 1.0
NO2: 5.0
NO3: 40

I haven't added any hummonia at all. The only thing I can figure is that there was a small ammount of ammonia and such left over in the trace water that I dumped out, but it doesn't seem like that would be enough to give me these kinds of readings 2 weeks later.

Maybe insects are landing in the water and causing the ammonia?