A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Water consumption in a fruiting crop system

I have never searched home system references for water loss ratios, but if I remember correctly, UVI data suggested a daily loss of around 1 - 2% of your total volume per day. I have been operating pretty comfortably even in the drought, but as my bigger plants are maturing, I have seen a dramitic increase in water use. It got so that I started looking for leaks in the system. I have a huge passion fruit vine, amongst others, and I think that my focus on fruiting crops is elevating my water use - now closer to 4 - 5% of water volume per day.

Any one out there with thoughts on the topic?

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Averan on April 11, 2011 at 1:08pm

same here. leaving a couple inches dry, but had me looking for tank leaks too! and the weather hasn't even really heated up here yet.

so the UVI numbers are not very useful guidelines for media-based systems. we can expect a lot more water loss due to the evaporative swamp coolers called gravel beds that we're using! i have to remind myself that it is still more efficient than a container garden using soil, but it would be nice to have some hard math to really back up that belief.

Permalink Reply by Kobus Jooste on April 11, 2011 at 1:56pm

O it is way better, but as with most things that I found when getting into aquaponics, the water use figures universally cited was a best case scenario, while I just went through a worst case one - in a drought, in summer with large fruiting plants.

Averan Gale said:

same here. leaving a couple inches dry, but had me looking for tank leaks too! and the weather hasn't even really heated up here yet.

so the UVI numbers are not very useful guidelines for media-based systems. we can expect a lot more water loss due to the evaporative swamp coolers called gravel beds that we're using! i have to remind myself that it is still more efficient than a container garden using soil, but it would be nice to have some hard math to really back up that belief.

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on April 11, 2011 at 4:19pm

Yes, it is not just the "gravel" causing evaporation but the larger longer growing fruiting plants can really suck up some water and transpire it into the air in an attempt to make the environment more to their liking. A big tomato plant and use up a huge amount of water.

Permalink Reply by Averan on April 11, 2011 at 6:06pm

which brings me back to the thought of building a cold frame greenhouse over my beds....

Permalink Reply by Jay Wolf on April 11, 2011 at 8:33pm

In my limited experience with our older systems, we lost 10% of our volume a day. We were using trickling biofilters at the time so I thought that had something to do with the high loss (or low.....) of water volume. The current system I am using now is losing 4% a day with mature plants throughout. That is up from 2% just 3 months ago. Great discussion and topic. I would assume that the longer we hold our plants, the more water loss we should expect.