Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello,

I am new to this forum and after reading pretty much every post I decided to join the action (also because the girlfriend is tired of hearing stories about tilapia).

I am a student in horticulture, so I know quite a lot about plants and growing them. Turns out lots of this knowledge is applicable to fish as well. When I was younger I had numerous ponds, goldfish and Koi's, which are still at my parents house in a pond as there is no room in my apartment for koi's of 50 cm. But I missed having fish, so a new project was bound to start!

My goal is to produce a dinner for me and my girlfriend consisting of tilapia, baked potatoes and a salad with minimal inputs. I am trying to make a system which incorporates a circular economy approach to farming, obviously aquaponics already is pretty circular. But fish-feed still has to be bought, so I also build a black soldier fly breeding room, which I feed my food scraps. These black soldiers will than make up a pretty big part of the diet of the tilapia, hopefully replacing fishmeal, combined with some duckweed. All will be produced indoors in my "plant science" room.

So I started searching for Tilapia fry, which is pretty much impossible to come by in the Netherlands. But as it turns out my university breeds tilapia for genetic analysis and they had a whole batch of fry. Suddenly all my plans were fast-tracked as I could not miss this opportunity to get my hands on +/- 20 Tilapia fry.

So in an evening I built this prototype aquaponics system.


As I did not cycle my system before adding fish, I immediately had problems with the NH3/NO2 lvls. I had to rush to the gardening center to get some active coal, which fixed the problem.

All in all my system is running pretty good at the moment, I think there is some nutrients deficiency's in the plants at the moment, but priority is to keep my fish alive till I have built my 2.0 set up.

This is what I have drawn so far and started to built today for my improved set up:



It will consist of a 200 liter fish tank, a grow bed of 60 litres (0.2m*0.3m*1m), filled with clay aggregrates. This will filter out the solids and the water is than transported to 3 drainpipes of 1 m long filled with net pots and plants. I have a 150 Watt LED which I will use to illuminate my plants and 2 big fluorescent tubes above my tilapias to make them happy.

So that was quite a long story, looking forward to comments/input!

Seppe

..
Tilapia... temperature...

You will need to maintain the 28c ..

Light.. you will need to maintain sufficient. Artificial. Light ..

Where the media bed overflows to the NFT, I would add a polyester fibre filter, to remove the remaining solids
..
.

The room is already 23c, so i hope with minimal heating and maximum insulation i can maintain 27c pretty easy. Theres a small light bulb above the fish now and it seems to provide enough light. But he no outdoor space so got to make it work inside!

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You'll have a lot of fun on the way to eventually eating that dinner!

That setup should work OK if the light bulb is powerful enough. No doubt, as a horticulturalist, you've made sure you have the right colour temperature.

Not sure about the baked potato though. I've never tried them myself - but I've seen lots of advice on here that root crops don't do very well in aquaponics.