my tank is too big?

[paul]

It was suggested that i get a smaller tank or more grow beds. I am building a combination raft and tower system. Am i mistaken in believing that a more lightly stocked tank, more gallons per fish, will be more stable as far as water chemistry is concerned. my belief was that i would just need to control breeding, almost eliminate it.. like a lot of people i want to grow tomatoes, and lettuce and other leafy veggies, but does anyone know of any kind of fruit that will do well in these systems?

paul

[TCLynx]

How bout some more details?

 

How big is your tank?

 

The main problem with having a huge tank (like say a swimming pool) with only a small amount of filtration is that it become difficult to pump enough of the water from the huge tank through the filtration every day to keep the pool from going stagnant and becoming a problem.

 

With a raft system you already have all the extra water in the raft beds to provide extra water volume stability so having an extra big tank doesn't necessarily give you as much benefit, heck if the tank too large, it may be more stable than you would like if you ever have to salt or adjust pH much, will all depend on your materials and source water and so on.

 

Most anything that you can plant and grow in small net pots will do well enough in a raft bed provided you can give the fruiting plants enough support to keep them from tipping over or sinking your raft.

 

Towers, well they are great for small short term plants but most of them are not really designed for really big plants.  The zipgrow towers are going to be difficult to handle if you fill them up with massive plants and most other types of towers will have problems with root clogging of long term fruiting plants.

 

Now I personally like to use some media beds to filter the water before sending it to NFT pipes or raft beds.  I've noticed more problems with nutrient deficiencies in the NFT and raft plants than my media bed plants.

[Sylvia Bernstein]

Happy to jump in and give you some thoughts, Paul, but need to know big of a tank, how many fish and how much grow bed space you are talking about.

[paul]

tank roughly 800 gal, beds soon to be 64 sq feet, with more to come.   just filled the pool / tank. used it because it was cheap, even with a pump. less than $50. i will have additional pumping as required, just trying to get a jump on cycling the tank before it starts to cool off outside. I am on acreage au plenty, and would rather produce than not.

   If someone nearby is willing to let me look at their setup it would probably be helpful, and nice to meet some people.

Paul 

[TCLynx]

Hay Paul.  800 gal is a bit oversized but within reason especially if you have the pumping and will set up a bio-filter to get cycled up.

I'm near by and home the next few days.