Mother from another mother

[coconutisland]

Above is the view looking into the fish tank, its pretty clear with no fish or plants in it! It has been running for about a week now. I made a few minor changes but nothing drastic. I will certainly make more as the system grows. One of the things I am trying to work out, is being able to scale the system up and down without causing shock to the system.

Right now, I have the system set up to feed three grow trays, Two are mounted on the wall to the right in most pictures, one is above the fish tank itself. Because I am messing around here, I have each tray set up that I can use it as an NFT, Ebb/Flo or drip. Hence all the pipes running around. The footprint is about 16 square, 4 X 4.



The theory here is, those three grow area's, act as one giant filter... This system is setup a bit differently in addition to that factor. The stand pipe in the back corner is actually an air lift pump, the total height from the floor to the top is 6 feet (2m) From there water is directed down through the three beds, which can be isolated or bypassed (again, as this is testing, I gave myself options) There is a tank on the floor that the stand pipe is resting in and an overflow from the fish tank to that tank, that is in case the standpipe or either of the trays on the right, should leak down. The other bed would only leak into the fish tank. Some funky plumbing to lift water off a shelf, over to the corner, the UP 6 feet, to be distributed to 3 different grow beds!



Ohhh, and did I mention that this is SUPPOSED to run all by itself!

Anyway,thats what I am cooking with, funky fish filters!

I do have better pictures, or at least better angles and closer in some cases. This is not a very large area, part of the reason I am using a tiered system.

Tomorrow, I add fish and hope for the best!

[Katzie_Wolf71]

Crazy ass setup man hope it all works out for the best for ya. Good luck bud.

[shineman]

good looking setup, way over my head. looks like you put a lot of thought and work for this. now you can go fishing in your own grow room lol . good luck and keep us informed.
gary

[Saturnalia]

Brilliant! I'm actually quite excited to see this. We have a future plan of moving up country and a system like this is very ,much a part of it.
Do the fish require any sunlight?

[coconutisland]

Put the first fish in yesterday and picked up the last of the 'fish' related things I was lacking, food and a heater as well as some additional water testing solutions. What happens is, the fish excrete ammonium nitrite which plants can not use, but in a few weeks, the filter system or grow beds in this case, build up microbes which break the nitrite into nitrate, which the plants can then use. Need to be able to test the different types of N for this start up stage.

As far as sunlight for the fish, nope, they actually like it dark and dart off to the shadows when the lights come on. At least today they did? I did consider just getting a fish tank, but the glass sides which allow light in, also promotes algae growth, so the simple tank seems like a good idea? In looking around at other peoples setups that are doing small scale Aquaponics or backyard DIY setups, many are using IBC water containers as the fish tanks but they all eventually paint them to stop the light and algae. Then outdoors later on, they cover the tanks to keep them cool... so... no glass tanks for now or sunlight for now. They do get a little bit of light from the grow lights, at least right now as there are no plants or canopy to shade any light.

The next step is to start germinating again. I have plans on germinating 4 to 5 hundred plants over the next 2 months, about 50 a week. Obviously not all of that will be pot, in fact only a few will be new strains that need to veg and get sexed over the winter. Hopefully I will have that done and a few new plants to send outdoors when I install the outdoor Aquaponics garden in the spring. That is supposed to be a hand made 300 gallon koi pond plumbed into Dutch Buckets. The general rule of thumb for these systems is a one to one ratio of fish tank to grow beds. 300 gallons of one, 300 gallons of the other.... The buckets I have setup run on about 3 gallons a piece so I should be able to support 100 on the 300 gallon tank. Not all of my plants will go into the main system, some will be sold, some will go into the ground in my soil gardens and I will start 50 tomato, 50 squash, 10 or 20 cucumbers.... The only plants I am planning in the koi pond setup will be peppers that I intend to sell the actual peppers off the plants, 100% organic, start to finish. Just so happens that I learned hydroponics from growing pot, I thought it would be a nice deal to share the knowledge as I take it to some extreme levels...

The eventual goal here, as a fully born out concept, is to provide the nutrient needs to the plant via a simple off the shelf tank, then use various, again off the shelf parts, to create a self sustaining system. I got tired of going back to the store for more dirt. Well, I knew how to use these rockwool cubes and I got about a pound per plant from them outdoors this past summer. I am going to try to reach that same goal with these coffee cans AND feed the plants via the goldfish (or Koi, or what ever fish)



This is what I ended up with in the same closet a few weeks ago, before I pulled it all down and built the fish tank system in here:



That was my first batch with the coffee cans and I had them set up a little bit differently for each one, settled on the set up I like best and now we start some new babies to go in here:



That's the third tray down and just playing around. I think I will be flooding either this tray or the one above it, at a constant low level flow, then set the starters on a bed of plain baked clay pebbles so just the bottom of the 'plug' is at the water level in the trough. Sort of modified version of an NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) Then, once the roots re-emerge at this stage, I can transplant into one of several options or go into soil even. Which some plants will do if I intend to sell them or put them in the ground. Plan is to sell around 300 pepper plants next spring, 50 each of 6 varieties. The other 200 or so will be just for me, or for plants that I want to harvest and sell the fruit. Along the way, I will grow out a couple more pot plants...

Thanks for all the compliments, its a grand experiment and I am hoping it all works as I envisioned. We shall see soon enough!

[Saturnalia]

Amazing.
So you not going to harvest the fish too?

[coconutisland]

LOL, Not a big fish fan myself so not at this stage. My plan is to get this up and running outdoors next summer and roughly, switch to shrimp over the next year? I still have to figure out the tank system for the little buggers. That is why I am working with these airlift systems, I am going to need lots of circulation within the tanks themselves and you can do that with the airlift when you set it up not as a 'lift' but just as a pump, within the water tank itself... The other part of that system is the number of tanks and the layout. Shrimp only need about 12 inches of water, they like to be near the bottom... But in order to get the population density to a level that supports plant growth, I need to move that shallow water around and my plan is to stack the shallow tanks in a rack system. Rather than run mechanical pumps at every tank, or one giant pump plumbed to all the tanks, I hope to have a system that just has the water drains/circulation runs, and air injection points. For this stage, I am building a 300 gallon tank for fish, that will get plumbed to my Dutch bucket system and grow beds. As I work through all those mechanical issues over the winter, I will finalize the design and materials for the shrimp tanks and this time next year, the test closet should be running on fresh water prawns! I do like Shrimp, not so much fish... There are also people growing out an Australian crawfish that gets up to small lobster sized and is cooked the same, but lives in fresh water! The problem with both the prawns and crayfish, they are cannibalistic if they get overcrowded. You do not measure the tanks by cubic volume for them, you simply measure the square footage of the bottom, hence the shallow stacked tanks, create lots of bottom space.... At any rate, I think I will still need the fish to act as a biological buffer? Might end up with a show tank of Koi somewhere in the mix?

So, complicate all of this with my cold Colorado climate and outdoor plumbing is just a nightmare! There are a number of problems with scaled up systems like this. Large scale quickly becomes massive tanks of water. I am just looking at a small system at 300 gallons. The larger the system, the easier it is to get biologically balanced but the more likely to have massive failure right? So my plan is to scale up the system in a way that the nutrients and the biological balance are scaled right along with the physical parts. As part of all that equation, I am trying to build a system that allows me to link fish tanks (or shrimp tanks) into a common sump, then use that to run all my grow beds or individual pots/buckets. Just looking at some of the failures of fish tanks, not ones plumbed like I am messing with, but simple pleasure tanks, wow, the potential to lose an entire crop or plants and fish is just one day of no electricity to move water or heat a pipe or something... Or a leak down taking an entire population of fish in a 3000 gallon system, oops! That's the kind of risk I am trying to eliminate with this setup... Most people have issue with lots of small tanks, because of all the wiring and all the little pumps along the way. I want to get the whole thing running on a compressed air tank set up in a corner, get the timing and pressure, air lines are easy to run and almost never clog. One of the other reasons for all these air pumps, they lift solids as in fish poo and extra food, bits of roots, water washed off the gravel in the system today.... all that gets lifted up and dropped back at the top of the system without any moving parts, just air and water... I worked on the airlift this summer and had it running by the middle of august. I contemplated putting plants into it with the airlift, but had to move indoors anyway. Another reason for the airlift, I had planned on a fish storage tank in the basement floor, then plumb the airlift up to drip down anywhere in the house for the winter, or outdoors for the summer... Eventually that would morph into the shrimp tanks in the garage... By then, I will likely have a greenhouse to work in or a plastic tunnel thingy at the least... I actually started to excavate the fish tank in the basement in August and found out I have a brick layer under the first 6 inches of caked mud, so that plan got put on hold...

Anyway, little fish guys seem to be loving room temperature as I have not plugged the tank heater in and it is maintaining around 65 f. Will start a whole chart now for monitoring the water quality a bit more closely than I do with regular hydroponics, where I simply make an adjustment to what I am adding to the system and move on... this stuff, takes a bit more time for the system to digest the inputs, which is fish food... and wait for seed to start popping this week...