Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello from Vancouver, British Columbia! I finally got my system up and running so I figured I'd post some pictures. My goal was to have small apartment sized system that could run without access to sunlight.

I've got a 170 Litre bin for the fishes, and two 50 litre bins for the growbeds filled with hydroton. I also built a grow light with 3w star leds.

The whole system with the grow light off:


The whole system under a grow light:


My growlight:


My grow bed:


The water draining:


Uh, I'm not very good at building things so I make liberal use of ducktape.


The big downside was the amount of noise it made while draining! This is all in my bedroom so I couldn't sleep while it was going, so I had been turning it off during the night. Somebody suggested to me that I extend and submerge the drain pipes so that they are quiet. I figured it would interfere with the bell siphon but tried it anyway. It worked beautifully and the bell siphon actually seems to start and stop more reliably now! It was a last minute change though, so the pictures above don't show submerged pipes.

The growlight was built using an aluminium sheet, a LED driver, and 24 3W star leds(one of which I broke) wired in series. So its currently got 2 white, 3 blue, and 18 red LEDS. The aluminium acts as a heat sink for the leds, and the led driver helps adjust the current to be optimal. I stuck the leds to the metal plate with thermal paste from a computer store, and soldered wires between them all. Took forever, because I've got shaky hands and am not a very good solderer.

I've got two small sacrificial goldfish in the tank to cycle the system. Hopefully they will survive, but I'm not hopeful. I've got a airstone and a heater(set to 20C) in there too. I've also sprinkled some kale, bell pepper and tomato seeds on top. I bought a little paper-strip based water test kit, and it claims my water ph is around 6.5 to 7.0 which I think is good news.

I'm not terribly handy so this had been a fun(and informative!) project for me. Anyway, I'll post updates if by some miracle something actually grows.

That is one funky looking lighting setup!

Anything sprouted in there for you yet?

Just be careful with the duct tape. It's good stuff, but not ultra waterproof over time. You might want to find something else, otherwise you'll wake up to a swimming pool in your bedroom.

Hey, welcome Levi.
The coloured LEDs are interesting. I don't know anything about indoor grow lights. Was there some science behind the colour selections/ratios?
Hope you sleep better now. Cheers mate.

Wow, that makes me want to drop some acid and rip my shirt off

Yeah a little. I was reading that plants only really absorb the red/blue color spectrums, and the green gets reflected away(which I guess is why most plants look green). Most of the sites I visited when researching recommended putting a lot more reds in, although I'm not sure of the reason for that. The two white leds are "Just in case" any other spectrum of light gets missed.



A couple of the seeds I put in started to uncurl, but nothing green yet. I think I've messed up one of the bell siphons(the other works great), so I've got to pull out the hydroton in one bed and fix it so I'll need to reseed that one.

Yeah, the duct tape isn't ideal. I'm going to keep it for now just because I keep tweaking things, but eventually when its more settled in I'll need to figure out a proper way to fasten things.

A quick update. The system currently has 4 sacrificial goldfish in it, but they all seem to be doing fine. Plants have sprouted, and I'm starting to think my "sprinkle seeds all over the place" method may not be the best of ideas. I've pulled probably 75% of the sproutlings as there are too many. There probably still is too many, I think the kale will probably need more room than that.

I've been leaving the pumps off at night and turning them on in the mornings. Probably not ideal, but it seems to be working okay so far. I feed the fishes a little bit in the mornings, but they don't seem overly excited about eating. Maybe they only eat when I'm not looking? They seem to be swimming around lots, so I'm not too worried at this point. I did once peal and chop up a pea and dropped it in though, and they went nuts over it.

Pictures:

Fishes and a little cave I bought for them to have fish parties in:


This is the reworked plumbing. I had a hell of a time getting the right-side bell siphon working right, until eventually it ended up like this. No idea why:


Plants are sprouting!


Close up of my future [s]triffids[/s] Kale and Tomatoes.

good re-use of space

aquaponics by day, disco by night

My system is finally showing Nitrites and Nitrates.




Fish are still alive and my tomato plants are looking healthy(as far as I can tell).

My kale doesn't look quite as good. I think the weather has been too hot for it, and I accidentally poked one in the wrong way and snapped its stem. :-\ I might try stuffing a celery-bottom in its place to see if it grows.

My peppers might be okay? Nothing looks wrong with them, but they are still pretty small. Maybe they take longer to grow in general.

I don't think the plants are liking the disco that much, they appear to be going leggy. Where the stem of the plant elongates, trying to search for light.

I've never needed interior lighting, but from research, it has something to do with penetration of the light into the cells of the plants. And I don't think simple LED's produce enough of that sort of light, I've even read up that most of the LED's sold on ebay for hydro don't work very well. But I don't have much experience in lighting, so I could be completely wrong .

Its possible, I don't really know that much about growing things. So the plant is supposed to be shorter with leaves earlier?

Usually the stem is shorter, but thicker, with leaves closer to the ground.

There are many different types of tomatoes though. They all start slightly differently.

With the lighting, the hydro people have it down to a science, a good portion of them like to grow things indoors.

There are many hydro resources which know far more than me:
http://www.hydroponics-simplified.com/h ... ights.html

Well in the end its all an experiment, so if they don't grow so be it. I might read up more on the hydroponics though, maybe I can make some adjustments that would help.

Whoa, those totes you used for the grow bed look a little flimsy! Have you had any issues with the sides bowing out or is the hydroton light enough that it's not an issue?

Cool system aside. Looking to make a little apt. size system myself. Was going to go with a shelf system, but I just saw this today and thought it would go well in the weird long entryway to my studio apartment:



Then again, I'm also super nervous about having an AP inside since I rent... and am also flirting with the idea of a small lean to greenhouse outside. We'll see... either way, love your set up! Cool lights!

funky lights! you might want to put the water inlet on the opposite side of the GB from the outlet/siphon, this will give the media a better chance of nitrification. I have no experience with grow lights but the plants looks like they needs more light.

I think Colum nailed it... they're leggy. What happens is when a plant isn't getting enough lumens they "stretch" to try to grow out of the shade of their neighbor and catch some stronger sun. If they don't get into good light quickly, that super-fast growth catches up with them in the form of a weak stem that can't support the plant and you get collapses.

The idea behind grow LEDs is to emit only wavelengths in PAR or photosynthetically active radiation, but the rub is that the hype far exceeds the beef for most lamps. While the technology is rapidly advancing they're still something of a specialty niche for people who love tech, have tightly controlled electricity needs or need them for temperature control. Good grow LEDs are expensive, many times what a comparable HID, CF, T5 fluoro or even induction lamp would run. Look for LED emitters in at least the 3 watts per LED range and plan on spending a good whallop. Read reviews and note that there are a lot of crappy Chinese knockoffs that don't save you any money.

For the nonce, consider a couple fixes:
If the LEDs are grow lamps, move them closer, a LOT closer, like a couple inches from the plants.
Either way, once the plants grow a bit they'll need more potent canopy penetration. The least costly but effective is to get some cheap shop light fluorescent fixtures that'll fit your setup and alternate warm and cool white bulbs. T5s are great but you can definitely use just regular T12 shoplights which are inexpensive and easy to work with... I grew carnivorous plants and other light-intense plants under them successfully for many years. Put the bulbs as close to the plants as you can manage.