Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi everyone, I've been on the forum reading extensively for about a month and live near Atlanta, GA. This forum has been a great resource and I've started collecting the materials I will need for my future system. A friend of mine introduced me to the aquaponics concept and I've been hooked ever since.

I'm planning on building my setup in my basement starting this fall. Due to several constraints I can not currently have an outdoor system. This has several positives in my opinion as it stays a relatively constant temperature all year long allowing me to constantly grow some veggies and possibly raise trout. So far my system will be a 150 gallon FT (lightly stocked) and 115 gallon GB, either flood and drain or constantly flooded. I'm leaning toward using the T5 lights. I would like to use HID lights but the heat worries me for two reasons:
1. You are supposed to keep your plants 2-3 away from them due to heat and that is kind of hard in a basement when you can't put your plants on the ground as they have to be above the fish tank.
2. I'm worried the heat may raise my water temp too high to raise trout (although it may be a positive in the winter).

Anyway, any help or advice is very welcome.

Welcome to the addiction..
i'm debating keeping my system in the basement.. i started an outdoor system last spring, brought half of it in for the winter, using t8's (3 pairs for 1 pair of barrel growbeds), and quite happy with how the system is performing..i'll probably do trout this fall, working with bluegill and yellow perch now
good luck, and take lots of pics!

Well if you go constant flood, you could put your grow bed next to the fish tank instead of over it. As long as the water level in the fish tank is below the water level in the grow bed it should work. If you are going to do the constant flood method You should probably try to max out your grow bed volume since you don't need to worry about water level fluctuations you could have twice as much grow bed as fish tank easily and the constant flood will help mitigate temperature rise. And the truth is you still get heat off of florescent lights and since you have to have them right on top of the plants, that heat will also be closer to the media and water so perhaps the HID isn't so bad after all.

I have a little front porch system that is a 100 gallon stock tank for a fish tank and next to it is a 100 gallon stock tank grow bed and there are also some towers hanging over the fish tank. That system actually works great for small fingerlings except for the fact that when it's 95-100 F here the water would start to warm up too much so I've tied that system in with the big system so it gets cooler water to keep it from cooking my fish too soon. But anyway, that fish tank and grow bed are the same height and when it's an isolated little system I simply pump the water through the towers which dribble back to the fish tank and also feed water to the grow bed which then drains back to the fish tank. That bed is constant flood and the water quality stayed good for the fish which is a large load of very small fingerlings right now eating high protein feed.

To grow trout, I would definitely go with extra grow bed if you can get twice as much grow bed volume as fish tank and then add extra aeration as well or at least lots of flow through the grow beds.

Thanks for the welcome!

Keith, did those cucs grow well for you in your system under the t8s? I saw about a month ago you posted that they may have sprouted. It would be nice to have fresh cucs in the winter, I've had my eye on a few bush varieties.

TCLynx, so would the drain be situated in the side of the GB in the setup mentioned? I'm guessing it would flow directly into the fish tank with no contact with the air, correct? So the growbed would only have to be a few inches above the water level of the fish tank...that may work for me. I guess there is no way to do a SLO without having a sumptank is there?

I plan on adding more GBs but since its an indoor system I basically need a new lighting source for each one so it can get $. I plan on adding more as soon as my resources allow. The expectations of more GBs is a major reason why I'm leaning toward constant flow since I can't figure out how to add a sumptank to my basement without looking up at the fish.

cucumbers didn't make it to the basement system.. they did ok outside until i got a bug problem..
i'm probably going to move my other pair of gb's into the basement next weekend and try some different plants..almost summer here! it's 54f (12c) - damn heat wave!

i personally would rather drop trout, to each his own..
welcome to the forum neighbor ! Im down here in south ga, good to see more folks tho.

Yea you could simply have the grow bed tops several inches above the water level in the fish tank or for extra aeration have the grow bed water level about 3 or 4 inches above the top edge of the fish tank so you could have the water fall into the fish tank but at least you wouldn't have to have the bottoms of the grow beds above the fish tank. So like if you had rubbermade stock tanks as fish tank and grow bed. Just leave the fish tank on the floor and put the grow beds on a single level of concrete blocks and you would have nice waist high beds able to drain back into the fish tank easily.

Deep grow beds will offer more filtration even if you can't mange the plant space and lighting right away. Heck, if you have the space, add more beds for the filtration, worst that will happen is that you might need to change water if the nitrates get too high because of not enough plants sucking them up. And there are some plants like watercress that don't need as much light but seem to suck down the nutrients very nicely, if you can stand that much watercress of course.

Of course I prefer deeper fish tanks but if you have a good cover you might keep the trout from jumping out.