Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello!

I am planning to build an aquaponics system indoors, it will be placed close to a big window of approx. 1,5x 2m facing north in the living room. Since I dont have a garden, and no cellar the best solution seems to be to have a indoor system without artificial light. Otherwise I might get raided by police due to suspicion of cannabis cultivation and I might be bothered by the constant light in my living room.

I saw this design:
http://www.brainright.com/Projects/Aquaponics/
of building a vertical system which I really like. I was planning to connect it to my Eheim 1046 pump with the following specs:
Pump output: 300 l/h; 66 lmp. gal./h.; 79 U.S. gal./h.
Delivery head: 1,20 m/wat.col.; 3 ft. 11 in./wat.col.
if it is enough? And connect the pump to a electrical on/off switch.

I see that its kinda cheap ($76) to buy a used aquarium of 175 Liters and, I planned to fill that with ~1fish / 10 Liter.

Is there any charts how much plants/volume of water within plant area that I would need for X amount of fishes?

Is it possible to grow without artificial light, especially in the nordic winter?

What do you guys/girls think of the vertical system? I find it practical because it takes less space and looks kinda cool

Welcome to the forum PF . You'll find lots of information here and plenty of people to help you with getting started.



Your column would have to be very short for this pump to work (It can only pump the water to 1.2 meters over the water level of the tank it is in). Even if you made very short columns the pump would not deliver much water since the volume of water pumped decreases as the head height increases. Take a look at this link for your pump and you'll get the idea - http://hw-lab.com/summary-of-eheim-universal-pumps.html



There isn't a chart but there is a guideline for this which isn't written in stone. I don't know if it would apply to column culture because it all depends on whether all the media is in contact with the water. Here's a good link to get you started - http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=6646




In Winter, if you can grow houseplants on the window sill then you can probably grow non-blooming plants like lettuce. Plants that have to bloom for you to have a crop won't do well in your Winters. I think supplemental lighting would really be a good idea because you won't get much growth in Winter without it.



Looks neat but I would like to see the plant tubes able to rotate so that the plants can face the window where the light is (while still being able to easily harvest).

Yes they were a member here back when that system was designed and built. The tubes are rotatable, the bottom of the pipes are just sitting in funnels..

Check out Janet P's system, there was a great deal of info there.


Joe