A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Fish-less Systems

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This is a group for people who have any kinds of fish-less systems, but yet are not doing classical hydroponics. Where we can share what we have come to find about making-home made nutrients, oganic-hydro, pee-ponics, worm tea hydro, bio-ponics, home-made buffers, water chemistry or anything else that is perhaps inappropriate for fish. As well as experimenting and sharing results for things that might be alright for our aquatic critters.

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Latest Activity: Nov 21, 2015

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Warning... Much of what may be contained here may, or may not be a good idea to apply to a system populated with living, breathing, happy fish, crustaceans or any other aquatic life. So be smart...

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Tags: storage, water, nitrate

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Comment by Vlad Jovanovic on February 27, 2012 at 1:08pm: Dave you might want to look into that a bit, I know that Nate Storey did a bunch of testing out different media and combinations for vertical towers and that there are a few things that you need to consider when choosing a media. Maybe he can chime in with the 411...and his experience.

Comment by David Schwinghamer on February 27, 2012 at 12:36pm: I was planning to do a few vertical grow tubes in the beginning of my horiz tube system and fill them with perlite so it sounds like that would solve my problem?

Comment by Vlad Jovanovic on February 27, 2012 at 9:16am: I definitely agree with TC on the need separate bio-filter for NFT when using non-mineral salts for nutrients. I really don't think there would ever be a need to have it in your tubes if you had a separate would do fine. Extra aeration never hurts either, esp. depending on how long your runs are.

It's not so important that the microbes are dispersed, though they probably will be...the nutrients that they breakdown from complex organic matter, to a plant usable (most basic elemental ionic form) is what your after in the water...

Comment by David Schwinghamer on February 27, 2012 at 7:57am: Im running a 4" tube, and a 20 gallon bin with an air stone and a 250 gph pump. I can see that the roots for my large plants are in the liquid. I see no clogging although I do have a sponge to slow down the flow and make it deeper with solution for the top tube.

Does a bio-filter collect things and disperse microbes? Should this be placed in the tube or in the sump where the pump is?

Comment by TCLynx on February 27, 2012 at 6:43am: Yea, I would say a "tube" system that is trying to run fish emulsion needs a bio-filter of some sort. I've run fishless with Nate's Zipgrow towers using Alaska and it seemed to work fairly well other than the strong odor the bio-filter media in the Zipgrow towers takes care of converting the organic nutrient source into plant usable nutrients. Most "tube" systems though need a separate bio-filter no matter if they are fishless or using fish unless you are using regular chemical Hydroponic Nutrients.

Comment by Carey Ma on February 27, 2012 at 5:06am: Yes, I would ask about flow rate and DO level in your tube system. You may want to try adding a or two bubbler to your pipes. You might also try constant flow. Also, do you have any place for you microbiology to react? You might want to dangle a sock/ nylon of perlite at the waterline to act as a colony (home) for your microbes.

Comment by Vlad Jovanovic on February 26, 2012 at 10:54pm: What is it that's not 'working as well'? What do you have in there? How big a tube (dia)? How much water depth? Flow rate? Is there a lot of root mass/clogging?

Comment by David Schwinghamer on February 26, 2012 at 9:21pm: Ive been running a fishless horizontal tube system for about three weeks now and its definitely not working as well as my fishless sprayer system. The only thing different with the two systems is that the spray system was spraying from 6am to 6pm continuous and the tube system is running the same juice alaska fish emulsion 5 1 1 and 0 10 10. The tybe system was first running 15 on and 15 off, then I tried 30 on 15 off, then I tried 45 on then 15 off. I guess I have to go back to the spray system unless someone can tell me what to do better. I was hoping I could get this tube system working because it will be part of my fish system next month.

Comment by TCLynx on February 8, 2012 at 7:56pm: Actually, in the early days of aquaponics, DWC or Raft systems was what most Aquaponics was. The university of the virgin islands is a raft based system and they have plenty of fish, actually they have so many fish that they actually remove solids from the system.

Comment by TCLynx on February 8, 2012 at 6:52pm: Scott, this would be the difference between

"Sterile" Hydroponics and Bio-ponics or what some people call ogranic hydro.

With the sterile hydroponics you have no bio-filter so you need to use the nutrient salts that are already in plant usable form since there are no microbes to take care of the conversion for you. And also since the science of figuring out exactly what the plants need isn't perfect, the salts become imbalanced and need to be dumped/replaced every so often.

If you switch over to some form of Bio-ponics or organic hydro, you do need a bio-filter and you need to cycle up the system to take care of the conversions for you. Now instead of guess work, I would recommend you find a balance and learn to recognize the signs of deficiencies in certain things since you have to figure out what/how to dose the system without "overdosing" anything. If you are constantly dosing too much of anything you will wind up needing to do water changes when things get out of balance, which defeats the water savings purpose of the bio-ponics.