Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey folks!

Something happens in my basement:




I will try to post updates soon

Looks like your going to be busy

A lot of work done, but much more coming soon

After a lot of work: almost done with the system:



Still need to water test everything ( 90% done ), fill the GBs with hydroton and put the LED lights up.
Not so far from cycling

will be interesting to see how effective the grow light setup is.
That is an impressive setup even if it was outdoors - let alone indoors/basement.

I have no experience with grow lights, but was thinking about buying some of these:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01G8GDV32?aax ... 3702140301

One of these should be enough for one IBC growbed.
Probably need 2 or 3 for the tubes of the same lights.

All i can say from experience and reading elsewhere is that household LEDs grow plants perfectly well. In terms of watts for your money, the grow light gives you 600w for $270, but you could probably get 600w of household bulbs for $100. You would have to build the array and screw in 40 odd bulbs though! But perhaps you can get away with less, and you would be able to distribute the bulbs to optimise growth etc

What size is you grow area?

in fact having reviewed the amazon page, the grow light gives out light to an equivalent of 600w incandescent, its actual power draw is 276w... I would go for household bulb array, much better value for money. An array of "warm whites" and "cool whites" to enable both leafy growth and flowering.

Thx Danny for the advice. I have LED bulbs all over the house and even in the basement, but I thought plants need red+blue, not the standard white ones.

My LED bulbs in the house are 6W I think and were about a $1 each. Still have a few new in box.

Depending on the color of the household bulbs, I'm sure you'd be able to grow stuff with them, but I would question the efficiency of 100 separate bulbs to something like a COB (Circuit On Board) LED. It's basically an array of 100 LEDs printed on a little circuit board, covered with epoxy. Quality COBs can reach as much as 174 lumen/Watt, which you'll never get out of household bulbs. Looking at the space you want to light, high efficiency will save you a bunch of money. Especially if you account for the efficiency of the LED driver, which could just be 1 large one instead of 100 separate ones.

I use a Cree CXB3590 COB for my indoor system, where I use 1 to light about 7sqft of growspace (~12k lumen). The whole setup, including heatsink, attachment clip, cone and driver, cost me about $80 and a few minutes to put together. Here's a link, including a tech sheet:
http://www.cree.com/led-components/prod ... mp-cxb3590

The discussion about red/blue vs. full spectrum is a heated one. If you want my 2c, there's enough evidence that plants do use parts of the green and NIR spectrum, so my vote is on full spectrum. The money plant ppl tend to go for 3500K LEDS, but I went with 4000K for a better balance between red and blue.

I just found this:

https://www.amazon.ca/Light%EF%BC%8CSun ... ds=led+cob

Don`t think I could build this system for cheaper. Specially if we think about the look as well

One of this should be enough to cover an IBC growbed area. What do you think?

Yeah I guess for your kind of scale, which is larger than mine, the COB LED systems are the way to go.

The problem with household bulbs is that the more powerful the bulb the more expensive the price per watt. On the whole the household bulbs are very economical, because they are mas produced in Chinese factories and you cannot beat that kind of economy of scale, but when you go beyond 15 watts, the bulbs get far more pricey.

For small localised set ups like mine (I use 4 x 15w household bulbs to light my area of around 3 sq ft, even when a bulb blows the plants continue to show strong growth) household bulbs are great, but on a larger scale it is less practical.

One thing to bare in mind is that LED tech is developing so quickly, a system where you can upgrade diodes etc could be very advantageous for keeping efficient, rather than having to replace a whole expensive lighting system if it breaks, or just watching it become older and less efficient over time.

How is the system coming along?


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Working hard on temps in the basement. Heating only the air was not enough so I purchased a submersible water heater which hopefully gets the job done and I can get some fish soon. Cycling in progress.
I will order the grow lights this week.

tagging along, what kind of fish are you planning on getting?