Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey!

Hi my name is Ben and I am new to this forum. I have a question to all of the community out there. Is there any baseline testing standards that are in circulation for Aquaponics? The reason that I ask is that I am actually about to start writing a thesis on Aquaponics and have not yet found any specific document that states baseline testing conditions that should be formed in order to make data collected and collated in experiments more relevant and more easily replicable.

Thank you in advance for anyone replying to this post.

ps I am not coming to this forum with no knowledge on the topic. I currently have an operational system that we are conducting experiments on; 1000 litres of water in circulation with dwc and nft currently in operation.

I must admit that i am unsure of what you really seek, but some may know exactly what you are talking about..
Needless, we all (generally) do simple measurements and try to keep levels within ranges..

I wonder if you really need to start by considering the fish being used.. and then the relevant levels that they each might tolerate..

There is an amount of detail available for keeping certain species, on Australian Govt. web sites, that I have seen.. eg DPI

eg. there has been work done on determining safe levels for metals etc.
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Hey,

Thanks for the reply to my post. I am coming from a more scientific perspective on this one. To conduct experiments we need to use STP's, Standard Testing Procedures. These enable us to measure things and replicate those measurements wherever we are in the world and it gives research a bit more validity due to there being a consensus on how to measure say something such as pH, EC, temperature etc. What I was trying to ascertain is a document that contains baseline levels or ranges, the minimum and/or maximum, for the conditions that make aquaponics work and make research that is conducted more valid and replicable. I just thought that if there is such a document it would really help our research or if there is not I would like to write a thesis on it.

I'm still not entirely clear on what you're after. If you send a sample for testing to a water quality lab, they would probably reference the procedures in this book (at least in the US) - (http://www.awwa.org/store/productdetail.aspx?productid=28493774). Can you give an example of an equivalent from another discipline?

Since AP is a mixed bag of several scientific pursuits - Aquaculture, Water and Wastewater, Microbiology. Hydroponics - I suspect the standards used, depend on which direction the researcher is coming from.

Scientific papers usually have methods sections or equivalent so that they can show how the testing was done to demonstrate that the results are meaningful, comparable and repeatable. Seems like you should be able to get an idea of the test methods for these..

If you're are looking to compare the results of most of us hobbyists we're generally dependent on less than perfect test kits doing tests that lack controls .

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Well said Scotty..

indeed I know not what the answer is, because we either have simple test kits of unknown accuracy, or some will have electronic devices for some parameters and (dare I say) have uncertain calibration practices..



Again - there is a deal of professional study on LC50 concentrations of various substances for different species of fish.. that is just one lot of data..
There is a deal of info in the basic "Rules-Of-Thumb" of AP that we hobbyists use..
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Ok yes I suppose that I am coming from the perspective of having access to reasonably reliable testing devices that are not exactly affordable or justifiable to the average hobbyist doing aquaponics; pH meter, EC meter, spectrometer, turbidity, DO, ORP etc that are all calibrated using lab STP's.

What I was thinking that could be formulated would be a set of baseline levels and ranges for things such as water temperature, Air temperature and humidity, pH, nitrates, phosphorous, potassium, iron, system maturation time etc. This document would be formed with the consensus of the Aquaponics community and could be used by people conducting research to make this industry a bit more legitimate, not that it isn't it is just hard to get people to accept it and implement policy to make the creation of larger systems easier; I am coming from the perspective that here in Finland it is quite hard to actually start to grow aquaponically on a commercial basis. We currently need to meet 27 laws and regulations in order to even think about growing commercially.

An example of this would be say I'm conducting an experiment with the effect of Air applied to the root zone in DWC. If my water temperature is low, say 14, I will have a higher dissolved oxygen concentration than I would have at say at 20 all good. But if I am studying how the plants grow 20 would be a better temperature than 14 as the nitrification reactions happens more efficiently at 20 than it does 14. My results would be totally different and it would be hard to compare them. If I had a base line of Say 18 degrees water temperature, 10-30 degrees air temperature, pH of 6,3 to say 7, nitrate levels of a minimum of say 10ppm etc it would be far easier to create replicable results which would validate data more. When writing a paper you could say in the abstract that growing conditions were following aquaponics associations minimum baseline standards. Then I would know you have a certain range pH, water temperature, air temperature, nitrate levels etc whatever is deemed to be the most valid and relevant in order to study aquaponics.

Maybe I'm asking the wrong forum on this one and in that case I apologise for wasting anyones time. I love aquaponics I'm super inspired by it and so glad that other people are too.

ps just tried to add a few photos if anyone was interested not sure if it worked

The problem with your approach is that there are simply too many variables to give a definitive ideal value for each parameter.

Air temp and humidity - these values are well known in the indoor hydroponics world. The same applies but it really depends on the plants you are growing.

pH - also dependent on which plants you want to grow, plant maturity and fish species.

EC/TDS can not be measured with conventional meters because the nutrients are organic based and not salts based.

DO changes constantly even with stable temps. The act of just feeding my fish drops DO by at least one mg/L.

Nutrient levels also are plant dependent and very difficult to control in AP. It is largely dependent on the fish feed and the amount that the fish want to eat at any given moment. For instance, to make your potassium test results valid, you will need to keep potassium at a contant level throughout the growth cycle. I can only see this happening if you dose KNO3 which defeats the purpose of AP and will skew the results by increasing Nitrates as well.

ORP is a tricky one. The typical hydroponic approach to keep ORP as high as possible to kill pathogens is not the strategy we want in aquaponics. A really high ORP will kill all our beneficial bacteria. The aquarium guys use ORP as a general water quality indicator and that is probably the role ORP can be used in aquaponics.

OK, to me it sounds like you're looking for a set of environmental parameters that are constant and are used for carrying out controlled experiments in Aquaponics so that as many variables can be eliminated as possible. At this point in time I don't know of any experimental standards of this type for Aquaponics. I suspect this is because controlling a complex biological system like this would be very difficult, there are too many variables as Chiumanfu mentioned. I suppose it might be possible to make up an artificial water starting from distilled or deionized water but then would it really mimic real life .