Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

well I had my first troubles with my aeroponics system today. My girlfriend alerted me to the droopiness of my lettuce( no alterior motive) and this surprised me as previously all had been well and i had crunchy lettuce. I then inspected all aspects of my system, starting with the pump and moving to the next most obvious aspect, the spray jets.

Here I found that I had no spray at all. I have different jets in the two tubs to see how they work. None of them were working, I put the pump on continual run and then proceeded to pull the goodies apart. all of the risers I was using had a lot of gunk that once cleared returned all of the jets to working order.

The obvious answer is to run a more efficient physical filter, the one I have at the moment is a good biological but poor physical filtration, will get more physical filter medium on the weekend.

well thought you should know.

Are you using nozzles produced specifically for aeroponics nick (ie bought from a hydro store).

no i am using the normal ones. but it was the risers not the nozzles that seemed to be the problem. once cleaned the nozzles worked again. I might go and invest in some though just to make sure. The guy at my local hydro store told me I would have this problem.

Thats why i'd like to try the ultra sonic foggers. Problem with good physical filtarion in an aquaponics system is that you will be forever cleaning the filter.

Nick you're probably lucky it was winter. The biggest downfall with Aero is that it is NOT forgiving. At all really (during summer) The roots are suspended in air. if the roots actually dry out then goodbye to what ever was atteached to the other end

The proper aero nozzels will be even worse nick, thier orifice is minute and you need quite substantial pressure to operate them 10bar comes to mind, but it was along time ago that i read up on it.

Sorry for the negatives

Nick, just jazz up your bio filter so that you do not lose the yummy goodness of the gunk... I upgraded my biofilter earlier this week and almost no solid waste now passes through the filter - and my water is running beautifully clear.
But I do admit that my biofilter is rather large for my system at its current stocking densities...

Thanks for keeping us posted Nick, problems and failures are even more important for people to hear about than successes...

Nick i love what your doing with the aero. What is the bio fillter medium you are useing?

its more of just a large bio ball biological filter there is not a hole lot of physical filtration going on. Did have some foam in there but it did not last long and need to get a better quality foam. THe system is doing well and I am about to reload it with plants. The barra are doing very well they have tripled in size from there original size. they eat like mad things.