Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi Everyone , I am Mark, currently in Germany,

I have been 'lurking' on this forum for a while, and learning a lot, but time to speed things up a notch !

I have a small indoor aquaponics setup that has been running for a bit less than a year, not always successfully, and an in progress outdoor one (on hold for colder months).

I hope to learn a lot and share a lot !

Thanks for having me on board

A few pictures of the current setup: (oldest to newest)

Welcome to the forum!

Hi Mark, welcome to the forum . The lettuce and parsley are looking good

Thanks a lot for the welcome Mel and Scotty !

@scotty435 : thanks, the parsley is delicious and grows back insanely fast, the salads did not fare so well, and bolted /turned bitter sooner than expected.

Hi Mark,

are you using natural sunlight through a window and/or grow lights?
What size is the system and what species of fish?

Pete.

Hi Pete !

Only grow lights : 2x Mars Hydro Reflector 48 led grow lights,
The system is rather small : bed is 80cm x 40cmx 10cm (way too shallow), 60 Liter aquarium with a few goldfish , the whole thing is mounted on used ikea shelves

It is rather barebones, just a single pump , no bell syphon constant flood.
I use a few 3d printed parts (orange parts) for custom things like clamps, some of the piping, media guard etc, those are all open source if anybody is interested : https://github.com/GreenBotics/greenbotics-yatoopi
also keeping a sort of 'growlog' of sorts on Google + , but I need to transfer those to a blog/wiki :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/collection/49aCp


Unfortunately, I am running into more and more issues with what seems like nutrient deficiencies, so need to fix that asap.

Hey Mark when you say you want to speed up a notch do you want to expand or maximise the use of what you have?
Do you have a API test kit?, take some photos and post them - your system problems may not be only nutrients.

Pete.

@Petesake: actually both :
- experiment with what can be grown in the indoor system despite the small scale
- setup an IBC based system outdoors (possibly 100% solar)

API test kit : I am almost out of test chemicals but last test (2 weeks ago) I had these results :

N03 : 25
N02: 0
GH: > 16°D
KH: 8
PH:7.2