I've had a small test system for around a year and a half, and currently run 6 silver perch (ranging from approx 18 to 25cm in length) in a stacked, half blue barrel fish tank under a half blue barrel grow bed.

The system is in a 1.8 meter cubed grow house with around 50 holes on NFT tubes and strawberry towers attached.

I run a shortened bell siphon with the breather set so that only the top 8cm of water gets dumped. This was done to increase the amount of water I could hold to add a bit of stability to my system. The NFT tubes collect a lot of heat, so the more water in the system the better. The siphon still draws hard, and from the bottom, so I haven't seen any problems as yet with dead zones.

I also run a tub of duckweed connected via a "no holes" siphon to the fish tank. This means the tide in the duckweed tank matches the fishtank and keeps the duckweed tank ticking over with new water all the time as it breathes in and out with each cycle.

I got into aquaponics as a result of researching things for my blog, where I blog about my attempt to learn 120 things in the next 20 years. I'm in year 2 and aquaponics was my first "thing". The current thing is programmable chips and electronics, but all "things" are ongoing, and tend to overlap. My first electronics project is an open source demand fish feeder with over feeding limits, where the fish hit a lever to get feed, but cant feed more than, or more often than, the user wants them to.

I'll have my head down for a while reading old threads and seeing what there is to see, and look forward to popping my head back up in a few days.

I'm known around the net mostly as 120ThingsIn20Years, or as Bullwinkle II.

My skills include being able to move slowly forward in time, and if I really concentrate, I can sometimes tell what I'm thinking.


-BullwinkleII