Aquaponic Gardening

A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Another angle of the system I described in my Making your own feed Part 2, using live feed in a sustainable AP system.

Views: 155

Comment

You need to be a member of Aquaponic Gardening to add comments!

Join Aquaponic Gardening

Comment by Carey Ma on November 27, 2011 at 8:14pm

Hi Paul, Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment.

You are absolutely correct. This model is not scaled to reflect a typical balanced AP system. The intent here is to show how extra energy (external nutrient inputs + sunlight) can be used to make feed, both live and dried to balance the seasonal (winter) food needs and how soil based organic growing and "warm blooded" animals can be integrated to enrich bio diversity and use most of the remaining nutrient to produce "clean" water.

 

At present I have these systems separate to try to determine input and output values of each system. It will be another few years before this proposed system is fully integrated and balanced.

 

As to the seasonal temperature fluctuations: My current system runs on a 1/6th acre pond, raising two types of carp and catfish so is basically "active" during the growing season and is pretty much dormant during the winter with ice fishing as the exception so water temperature is not a problem. My indoor systems however do need heating which is accomplished with electrical heating supplemented with solar when conditions allow.

 

In lue of "ballast plants" typically used in tote or "friendly" type systems, I use 50 gallon drums as my filter and bio reactor. I agree that in most cases I would prefer to use a swimming pond configuration if I had the space and resources but in this application, my primary intention is to conserve space and show a multiple I BS.

Thank you again for your comment.

Cheers

Comment by Miguel Afonso on November 27, 2011 at 8:03pm

Nice to be among fellow tinkerers and dreamers. Now we need enough funding to keep up with our ideas! Love the CAD drawings. 

Comment by Paul Holowko on November 27, 2011 at 12:37pm

I have built this sort of system a couple of years ago.  It contains everything minus the duck poop and the guppy pond.  All fish eat algae and are not fed by me.  I have algae "solar panels" in the tank.  If you have not built this thing yet, here are a few problems I ran into getting the whole thing done that I would like to share with you.

Seasonal Cycles:  There is a lot less sun in the winter than in the summer.  You need to consider the number of fish and food production amounts for the nitrogen cycle.  That's one balance.

Water Temperature:  I'm assuming this is going outside......  There is a large difference in water temperature between summer and winter.  You may want to consider burring your pipes into the ground to have free control of water temperature control in the winter and summer.  You are also going to need a solar water heater.  For this application I would use a lake.

Type of Fish:  Most fish that eat algae like water temperatures around 70 F or better.  Unless the system is very large, temperature swings  will kill your fish, shrimps, crabs and crayfish. 

 

Ballast Plants:  I don't see where you have a set of plants dedicated just for keeping the micro-biology is check.  There needs to be a pond where plants are grown to hold large enough colonies of microbiology to survive planter bed harvests.

 

The poop to plant ratio does not look right:  It appears there is more energy from poop than something to consume it.  Without a lot of ballast in plants and in water, it appears to be difficult to control the biological energy flows.

© 2024   Created by Sylvia Bernstein.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service