Yes, my dear husband (love you Dan!!) is being a good sport about another crazy project idea - starting up a mini-aquaponics system in our Dining Room. It's a small footprint, the whole system takes up aabout 1.5’ x 4’ space, so a total of 6 square feet along a wall. So why are we doing this?
I really want lettuce and spinach in the summer. I know, not very permaculture of me, but we use it every day between salads and breakfast smoothies. We are growing a lot of other greens outdoors to see how they go (see the Summer Greens posting I made earlier), but what about our favorites? After a lot of researching and design work and location debates, we settled on trying a small aquaponics set up in the house using aquariums.
I started by getting a couple of second hand aquariums and a sturdy stand to stack them so I could get about 100 gallons circulating around the two. After setting them up in the living room, I partially filled them with water so the chlorine would dissipate. This was May 25th, just some water and a pump and small bubbler. The cat's attention is already focused!
Progress has been slow, we created a water bridge/siphon system to get the water out of the top tank and into the bottom as the pump takes it back and just let the system run for awhile. After a few days I put in an old large crystal punch bowl with some washed gravel and planted some mint cuttings to root from my sister's garden. We started fishless cycling using pure ammonia to get the bacteria growing.
All this was fine and the ammonia levels were just starting to come down when last week I saw mosquito larvae in the tanks!! So off to the pet store to get some guppies. The first thing those little fish did was voraciously eat every last little wiggler in that tank! The ammonia levels spiked again and we lost one of the fishies, but after getting a donation of pond water from the goldfish pond at Bakers, the system has stabilized some and the ammonia levels are almost zero.
We are putting up the lights to stimulate growth and supplement the 14"solar tube’s natural light – which we’ve found is not nearly enough to grow by indoors for anything other than low light house plants. We’re working on the grow towers that will hang from the ceiling. The tubes will be rearranged to the back in order to ‘pretty it up’. This is what the in-progress system looks like now.
The expanded clay pellets in the bottom tank are there to absorb water and act as a surface for the bacteria to colonize as we prepare the grow towers where they will reside. I’ll add more of the pellets to get them ready for the towers today, they need to be rinsed outside because they are very dusty before being added to the system. I’ll post more pictures and updates as this progresses. It’s kind of fun and addictive :)
Replies
Thanks for the comments everyone - it's nice to know we are not alone in the madness. :)
Cathrine, apparently the water wasn't moving enough over the entire surface of the water, so the mossie larvae appeared! But they were such a loved treat for the fishies, I wouldn't mind more of them in the tank...as long as they all get eaten before they pupated and hatched!
Liz, thanks for the ideas! A question, I thought the mosquito larvae would not live in moving water, so I can't tell from your photos if your water going back into the tanks is 'dropping' above the water level to create agitation or if it is under the water surface. Curiosity question since I have not tried to do anything like this, but am interested.
Nice guys good luck with that looks fun. I have a similar system in my apartment with a sump and grow lights. Its been running for 6 years and is actually a pretty nice show piece. It looks like a zoo exhibit with land, marginal habitat, pond, and waterfall. It has not produced much becuase its so small, but its a demo unit and I have learned alot from it. I have successfully grown many herbs in there such as Parsley and Mint. The fumes help keep out fruit flies, phorids, gnats, ect.. I am moving soon and purchased a 55 gallon tank and stand. The tank will be inside to help with temperature control. I intend to convert a 29 gallon tank into a sump filter for this and then have it pump out to grow beds outside. I think in this way I will be able to get some real usable production and still keep costs low. No grow lights, no heaters ect... Just one rather small pump running the whole thing.
Hi Ryan, do you have any photos of your system? It sounds great!
It is possible, thats how I got started doing AP. I never had fish or an aquarium so I thought that is a great place to start. I have a few videos of my aquarium ap adventure here on the bottom of this page http://aquaponicscommunity.com/profile/DavidSchwinghamer
I was hoping that eventually it could be a breeding tank for a larger outdoor system that I envision in our future sometime, we'll keep you posted. :)
Fascinating! It will be fun to see how this progresses. We have breeding tanks in our family room/dining room, and I've wanted to turn them into AP systems so we'd have to do fewer water changes. Maybe it's possible after all....