Tropical Aquaponics System - Costa Rica

[Survival Gardener]

Hey everyone, here's my intro.  I live in Costa Rica and love aquaponics and gardening with perennial edible plants.  I also run the site http://survivalgardener.com

The system in the pic and video has been running for about a year.  It uses one pump and only 75 Watts to run the entire system.   We designed to use gravity and auto-siphons to do the brunt of the work.  All of the water is recycled and the plants grow in volcanic rock filled grow-beds that drain and fill every 15 minutes.

Due to it’s totally custom nature, we’ve had to make some adjustments and changes in process.  It was built without plans and based on concepts and ideas gathered from many hours/days on Google, YouTube and various aquaponics forums.  I’ll have to give a shout out to Murray Hallam in Australia for giving us ideas and concepts and Backyard Aquaponics for the guide that helped us build our first small system out of IBC tanks.  I just found this site and look forward to learning from all in this forum.

We just got the big kinks worked out. There's a lot of wind here and debris was getting into the tanks. We added sedimentation tanks that really helped out. The cool side thing is, they produce great sludge to pour into our dirt gardens.

We recently switched out our Jaguar Guapote for 20 Catfish, and they seem to be doing fine so far. The Guapote were just too predatory for the small tanks. The tilapia in the other tank are still doing fine and reproducing.  If catfish work well, we might switch out the tilapia as well.