Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

A large number of people are going to be drinking urine (processed) within the near future. This is a worry because of the fact you know what you eat drink and are medicated with is sort of within your control.

Desalination is stupid (apart from 1 project which was a bit sensible).

There appears to be some (? a phobia) attached to recycling body, urine, fluids.

Or as Stuart said 'I really don't'. Piss in the tank.

Katib - adding more fish food is fine if the fish will eat it and if your water parameters don't cause problems. What I was thinking though, is that you could just add fish food to the tank without the fish and as it breaks down the nutrients will become available. Might help to break it up so it breaks down faster. Since there aren't any fish in the system you wouldn't have to worry about excess ammonia killing the fish.

Thanks Scotty .My question is why we do not use this way instead of the traditional way of growing fish and plants , is the presence of fish essential for the system taking into consideration the known limitations and challenges that accompany the presence of fish .

Their are limitations and challenges no matter which way you go. Fish are not essential to growing plants but then if you didn't have them it wouldn't be Aquaponics. People have tried or are using a number of other methods like Vermiponics. For most of these systems the bacteria to break down the food source into Nitrates and other elements is essential but you could use prepared chemicals like Hydroponics and even bypass the bacteria.

Going toward the extremes of no fish, you wind up in Hydroponics or no plants, you wind up in Aquaculture. Both of these have issues with their waste that AP doesn't.

Yes it's challenging at first but once a system gets established it gets much easier. Partly because you know what your doing and partly because the system becomes more stable and predictable.

Hi scotty
. So we agree that hydroponic has its problem with the waste and the availability of the required chemicals .Aquaponics has the known challenges such as keeping ammonia and nitrite level within normal range while keeping nitrate within the range necessary to grow plants .In addition to possibility of fish death at the beginning due to ammonia or after recycling due to diseases or even due to ammonia when something get wrong.
But the question is what is the drawbacks or the problems of this method ,let us call it bactriaponics or compostponics or whatever the name is, because I think it is not aquaponics nor hydroponics nor vermiponic .

The one common thing between all the systems is they have some form of biofilter with bacteria. The problems would be what you see in regular AP or Aquaculture when the pH crashes or the filter gets overloaded etc....