Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Friends, family, fellow human participants of the solution:
My name is Marius and I am happy to have found you guys and girls and what you are doing here.
I am absolutely amazed by the Aquaponics method and I am currently developing my first system for home use.
If this is only going half as well as I think, then everything will be good and I will have found another major puzzle piece to my way of life.

I will try to pose my questions in the relevant sections however I feel it might be important to point out right here that I will be using an indoor system as we don't exactly get a whole lot of sun here in Northern Germany and the weather is just so nasty most of the year.

So, hopefully in a year from now I will be the LED expert in this forum since this seems to be somewhat of a no-go for all you sunlight spoiled Australians We don't have that much sun here, but we do get a lot of fresh water (which I won't need too much of in an AP system)

I have already read some interesting things about LED growing lights on here, thanks guys! As well as other good sources, one from Germany that was especially helpful talking about plant growth and the necessary wavelengths of blue and red light spectrum.

Since the energy required to maintain water and air temperatures outside or in a greenhouse will be way higher than the energy required to power a few hundred LEDs for basement grow I will choose the latter route and then in summer think about going outside with a number larger - naturally lit.

I just wanted to say Hi and that I'm very glad you people are alive and kicking! The website is just marvellous, I very much like the condensed information laid out in very easy to navigate sections, great job.

Anyways, be prepared for some very unsettling questions about Fish & veggies over the next couple of months

Much love from Germany
Marius

Welcome to the forum Marius.
I too plan some experiments with LED's - though at the moment it's quite far down the list of things to do

Cheers

Dui.

Hi there Marius and welcome to the forum. So glad you like the condensed information, though that is not usually what most people have to say
Look forward to seeing the pics of your progress
Faye

you made me feel right at home, thanks

Hi Marius,
There are a number of us North European people around. We are well aware of the limitations of the sunlight, and the propensity for precipitation.
I wish you all the best with your LED project, but I fear that you may be in for a bit of disappointment. LEDs do not offer a good return on investment for the amount needed to grow plants properly. You might be better suited to looking at normal fluorescents, with LED supplements to fill in the missing spectrum of light (such as blue). The cost of LEDs still do not justify their uses at present.

Although having said that, if you wait until AFTER Xmas you can find a lot of LED based lights relatively cheaply. From all the reports I've read, 1 blue LED to 3 red LEDs is the optimum ratio. Time to hold out for the January sales.

http://www.ledgrowlamps.co.uk/benefits-led-grow-lamps-lights.php

I know this is an LED retailer's site and therefore probably biased towards LEDS, but it makes a reasonable argument, especially the power usage angle.

I plan some experiments, probably next year with LED's.
People grow a certain type of flower (I forget the english) here and many of the fields around my village are wired up with fluorescent lamps, I want to run an experiment in AP with those flowers, half lit by fluo half by LED, and some in the garden as control.

Not enough hours in a day

I'd recommend LEDs for starting seedlings and establishing clones. I've done some small experiments with LEDs which I designed and soldered together myself for a fraction of the cost that purchased systems cost.

One side affect that I thought was interesting is the fact the skin on my hands look amazing after a few months of fiddling with the plants, training and pruning. The young plants responded to them amazingly but after they reached a certain point they just seemed to stop growing. It is really hard to get a large yield from fruiting plants with them they unfortunately don't penetrate the plants canopy very far (which I thought was the reason they stopped growing drastically when they were still "seedlings"). The benefit of them is they give off almost no heat and you can basically place them directly on top of the plants. So unless you're ready to spend some big money or a lot of time soldering I might recommend going with a 250w-600w HID/HPS ballast system if you're going for production.

LED tech is pretty young at the moment so I look forward to seeing what you come up with. They for sure are the future, they just need to be developed more. When I finished my grows with them they had just released 1w LED lights which seemed to be very promising (and expensive). The other problem I had was the LED bulb itself doesn't spread the light very well (think of very "focused" flashlight). The greatest part about them is you can tune them to the exact spectrum you need. I ran a 4 red LED to 1 blue LED ratio. They're very cool to play with and if you have the spare time I'd recommend building your own arrays. Simple calculators for resistors and power supplies can be found online, but that's if you want to DIY. Loads of LEDs can be cheap on ebay.

Enough rambling! Good luck and welcome!!!