Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

So looking at a couple issues I have come up, I am thinking about adding an automated water mister into my indoor system. The reasons for it:

1) With certain plants (Spinach) I get red spiders when I try and grow them.
2) My plants don't seem to grow as fast as I think they should be, and the nutrient levels seem fine
3) It would be nice when I am planting new seeds to not have to worry about misting the gravel to help them sprout.

I use an Arduino microcontroller that I program to run my system, so I could set it up to run however I wanted, I have figured on misting the system twice a day for a couple minutes each time, then running the fans that are part of my system to help dry stuff back out again (the fans are normally on 5 minutes every hour anyways).

Does anybody have any thoughts on this? As I continue to build my system, I keep working more to replicate what would normally happen outdoors, this seems like a natural extension to add. Also any recommendations on how to set it up? I will most likely be using water out of a plastic tote for misting, I don't want to use our city water because of the additives, also I don't have a water line in the room my aquaponics are in.

I make my system flood so the water level covers the gravel once per day till the sprouts come up. Then, it's back to normal F&D.

That would work for the sprouting issue, but honestly that's just me being lazy. The real issues I am trying to solve are the red spiders and trying to get better growth out of my system.

I know I could spray it manually myself, but I also know I wouldn't get around to doing it every day, when I am sprouting stuff, that is normally only a week or so that I have to do it.

What is your PH level? Could it be locking out the nutrient uptake by the plants?

Regarding the misting: I think it could be beneficial as I believe some plants grow better when they get moisture on their leaves.

PH is a rock solid 7.8, doesn't matter what I do, thats what it sits at (I think the gravel is buffering it, though not entirely sure). In previous discussions here nobody thought that was causing issues in my system.

I should say, I am not really having any real issues, this system is at least a couple years old and has been a pretty solid producer. However I am currently working on a new system that will be about three times the size (also indoors) and I have been playing around with some things trying to increase my production.

Though I get produce every week out of my system, I never come close to matching the growth I see on the boards here, I know a big part of it is that my system is indoors and can't get enough light to match an outdoors system, but I have managed that fairly well. It seems that each time I am able to mimic yet another part of nature in my system, I get a jump in the quality and quantity of the produce from my system.

Also before I get comments on my lighting setup, I am running fluorescent lights, I know I could do better with some of the high pressure sodium or other lights, however I don't want to deal with the power consumption of those lights. My intention is to be able to run the majority of my system off from solar and wind power at some point, and running bulbs that take upwards of 1000 watts is not feasible for me to try and power with solar.