Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Working on uploading pictures. Stand by.

Good Morning. So time to post some pictures

Ok re-started browser.

Yesterday after delivery


And sorting the towers


A bench for doing the pulling/planting


Towers down the tunnel


Already planted stuff, water chestnuts are a bit out of hand, time for some harvesting I think.


Seed starting rafts


Quick picture this morning


Some Basil cuttings

Can you tell me what the towers are made from? They look like pvc post covers. I have enjoyed reading all your posts. I am green with envy. Up here in South Dakota we just don't have the growing season that we need unless we want to heat green houses. which kinda defeats the reason for growing your own food to start with. Also can you or any one tell me how I can re visit a fourm topic from previous days on BYAP? Thank you ahead of time. Larry

They Are PVC but they are specially made for the purpose and not simply cut open fence covers and the real work was in developing the filter matrix that not only filters the water and provides surface for the bacteria to work but supports the plants and gives their roots a place to be.

The inventor of these great towers actually lives in Wyoming but he does use a greenhouse.

The Single Zipgrow Tower Bucket and stand

Grow 8-18 plants in about 2 square feet of floor space.
But a single 5 gallon bucket isn't really enough to keep water temps stable for hot or cold weather outdoor use and about all you get to grow in a 5 gallon bucket would be a goldfish or something like that.

These things look great... I wonder if I can create a similar system using pvc guttering and a lot of rubber bands and sticky tape...

Perhaps you could neogenix, however, once you got done messing with that and struggling with what didn't work, wouldn't it have been easier to just get the real thing from the guys who invented it. Nate's just up in Laramie Wy.

So the towers are also the biomedia? No need for filter or grow beds?

Yes the towers have a filter media in them much like a coarse fish tank filter. They provide a great home for the bio-filtration bacteria as well as worms and plant roots and do a good job filtering solids as well.

Only issue you are likely to experience if you are providing absolutely NO other filtration is When you are pumping up high in small pipes and have small openings feeding the towers, you can actually experience clogging of the feeds to the towers so it is fairly important to protect your pump from solids and debris that might clog the plumbing feeding your towers. And even with that, you need to check the flow to your towers very regularly to make sure algae and bio-slime haven't stopped the water from getting to your tower.

Can you do Tank+Pump > Solid filter > Towers > Repeat? or the solids must be filtered before touching the pump?

You can, however, solids are far easier to remove if you don't blend them up with the pump first.

That said, the towers are actually pretty darn good filters for those blended up fish poo solids.

It is other sorts of things that will cause more plumbing clogging issues

The Fish poo actually isn't very solid, nor is the bio-slime or even uneaten fish feed. The solids that are far more likely to clog your tower feeds or even your pumps are things more like debris that fall into the tank like leaves and sticks, Snails, tiny fish like mosquito fish and algae.

So if you can protect your pump from the harder larger debris, then allowing the fish poo through the pump is actually not a bad idea on a tower system. You just have to make sure you have ample filtration for the amount of fish you have and keep in mind that towers in unprotected agriculture applications can have an extreme impact on system temperature (as in if you have too many towers and your system isn't in a temperature protected location the towers act as very effective heat exchangers between the system water and the air surrounding them.) If your climate can have extreme temperature swings between day and night, you may need to limit the number of towers or take steps to mitigate the temperature swings (like heating at night when the temperature drops too much from the daytime high.)

Thank you

Have you considered adding red wigglers to the tops of your grow towers? They are very effective at turning solid wastes into nitrogen

There are red wigglers in all of my systems. While they are effective at helping to process solids (it is actually the bacteria they are symbiotic with) and they are what some people call a secret weapon all my numbers and recommendations figure that there are worms already living throughout the systems.
If there is too much solid waste for the amount of filtration your have, then you need to expand your filtration or do some solid waste removal. By adding worms to a system you are simply diversifying it's effectiveness, it doesn't necessarily make it instantly able to handle more than it can handle though.

I like N8 believe in very robust filtration capacity, Lots of surface area to handle nitrification as well as plenty of space to handle the solids for slow conversion. If you are getting spikes in a mature system that can't be explained by some problem or event, it probably means that your filtration is not Robust but is just barely able to keep up.

Looks great!

How is the yield/space ration? And is there enough sunlight down the bottom?

Thanks a lot!