Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'm a newbie to aquaponics and after reading through the great info on this forum I've decided to take the plunge. My main goal is to learn about aquaponics so I'm starting fairly small. I have a 55 gallon aquarium and a 41" x 59" southeast-facing window that gets full sun until mid-afternoon, and since this will be an indoor system it needs to be fairly compact. I'm hoping to grow tilapia, salad greens and herbs.

The grow tubes are 4" PVC about 55" long, to have a cap at the bottom with a large drain hole in the center and screen to retain the growing medium (I'm thinking pearlite). I'm planning to make it such that I can just rotate each tube 180 degrees for easy access to the plants, and so that I can easily lift and remove each tube for cleaning.

It gets rather cool near my window this time of year but there is actually a heat register right under where the tank is going so I'm going to create vent holes along the bottom of the base frame for the warm air to escape and that should provide plenty of heat, but I figure I'll use a small electric heater for supplemental heat if needed.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

very nice idea the towers are similar to the strawberry towers I'm running. There are a number of threads on tower systems.
Welcome to the forum

Just curious about other experiences... I tried something similar once. Once i had a flourishing bacterial population going, that 4" pipe would clog within 48 hours of cleaning. Rather than perlite, i had pea gravel in my pipes and no way i would imagine that they would clog. After a couple f episodes finding most the water on the floor having spilled over the tops of the pipes, i shut it down.

My current (small!!) system is a series (5) of sterilite plastic bins about 2 gal. in size. at the top. They drain into a larger bin with mechanical filters on top of biofilters. That sits on top of the main reservoir (~15 gals.). The water drains from the filter into the reservoir and then pumped back into the bins.

I have noticed, after running that for about a year now, that i am again starting to have issues with bacterial growth. The small pump uses 1/2 PVC piping up into the bins. The drain pipe is 1". I recently started getting baterial growth that quickly will clog the 1/4 inch perforations in the pipe and i am getting either no fow into a bin or the exit drain is clogging. NO gravel or anything to clog yet it still does.

Now, truth be told, this is not an aquaponics system yet. Perhaps i still have too many nutirents in the water that plants would remove and reduce my clogging issues? Or, when i start building my real aquaponics system this summer, will the larger diameter plumbing solve the issue on it's own?

So my question is, can Jay expect, if not a nice aquaponics system, a nice soothing waterfall with a drained tank and a drenched floor?

Poppa

I'm not sure about the bacterial growth, but I would make sure that the towers are mounted over the top of the tank, so that any overflows would go straight back into the fish tank, not on the floor (if if can be avoided)

Hi Jay:
The more I look at it the more I like your idea (the yellow polygon is the window, right?). The plants section will be extremely space efficient compared to grow beds. I'd love to see such a thing filling a window with plants! Plan for leaks and it should work great!

Thanks for the replies. I've been working out a way to shape the tube supports (top and bottom) so that if water reaches them, it will run to the center over the tank rather than to the sides. I'm not planning for them to get wet in normal operation so I'll make them out of wood with several coats of polyurethane, but if the tubes overflow or the plant openings leak at the edges I should just have wet tube supports and not a wet floor or dry fish. This is going to sit on a wood floor so I REALLY don't want any leaks!

I also have a water alarm that's meant for basements. It's sort of like a smoke detector but it sits on the floor and has two metal feet. If any water reaches the feet it sounds a piercing alarm. That way if I get leaks on the floor for some reason, hopefully I'll hear the alarm right away. Now that I think of it, I can probably rig a ground-fault interruptor to automatically shut off the pump as soon as any water reaches the floor.

Yes DD, the yellow rectangle is the window opening. If this works, it seems like one could build a pretty decent greenhouse that's more of a "greenwall", with only vertical or near-vertical glazing. By going vertical you could get the same growing area for far less expense and far better energy efficiency than a traditional greenhouse. It wouldn't work on a commercial scale (imagine a 100-foot-high wall) but it might be a great way to add significant growing space to a home at relatively low cost.

for your supports, if you bevel the top edges of the round holes, and cut a few grooves, if the water does run down the tubes, it would be collected by the bevels, and run through the grooves on down the tubes to the next level. (if you only have the two levels of support, do that to the top cuts, and on the bottom, bevel the holes all the way down, and run a few shallow grooves in the bevels, allowing any accumulated water to drip into the tank....
Just a thought.

One other thing. In my experience with keeping aquariums on the floor (in college) or directly on wood (now) I have found that if you have some way for air to circulate underneath. I had a tank flat on a table, and when the tank was moved, the table was really nasty. I now have a tank on a stand where one edge of the tank is hanging off the edge. While I have had an occaisonal drip, and even an overflow, when I moved 6 months ago, the stand was dusty, but no mold, critters, or anything of the sort.

If I were to design it now, I would have 6-8 shallow grooves providing ventillation (one in each end, and 2-3 in front and back) to keep support all around the tank, but allowing air flow to keep from growing gross nasties.

Now that I've actually built this system, I started a new thread for it Here..