Plan for spring

[Windy Elliott]

I have a basement dedicated to aquariums and two aquaponic systems. Unfortunately none of my tanks are larger than 75 gallons and I have 5 adult breeding tilapia, 1 group of fingerlings, and 1 group of fry. I'm going to run out of room for my tilapia fairly quickly I think. I would love to have a 300 or 400 gallon tank for them to continue growing in, but I don't have the room in my basement and the weather is going to turn too cold outside for me to move them out. So we are going to suffer through the summer and plan on building a new summer system outside.

 

This is what I would like to do. I have a deck that is 9x11 over a backyard patio that is about twice that size. I would like to build an IBC tote system where the grow bed is actually on the deck with planter boxes around it for additional grow space while the fish tank from the aquaponic system is down in the shade under the deck close to some rain barrels and a small outdoor greenhouse. I am trying to maximize the space I am using to farm in my townhouse and hopefully be growing most of my own food and have several tilapia growing to dinner size by the middle of the summer.

 

I have several months to plan this out and execute it and I plan on trying to build the planters for the deck as well as the IBC system from scratch. Please feel free to give me advice and input into things I need to consider as I try to build this system.

[TCLynx]

What sort of instructions do you need for the towers?

I could probably find some Videos for you or even make one in a week or two.  Basically those towers you pump the water up and flow a trickle of water through the tower and it comes out the bottom where you catch it in a tank or trough to direct back to the fish tank or sump.

 

And Those Zipgrow towers are filtration so about the only thing you need to make sure of is that the flow to them won't constantly clog up and annoy you to the point of distraction.  I think I have a video showing how I'm directing the flow and avoiding the issues of too much solids clogging things up, only issue I usually have are the snails clogging the holes occasionally now.  Ah here is the tower flow video Blog entry