Fish vs Liter vs Growbed aquaponics

How much space is required for an Aquaponics System?

Well that depends on how big a system you want to build and what you make the system out of.  We are always being asked how big a system do I need to feed a family of four - the answer is how much does a family of four eat! Consider, how many fish do you want and how many plants do you want to grow. A 1,000 litre (264 US Gallons) tank in your aquaponics system will support between 50 and 80 fish. That will support between 1,200 (317 US Gallons) and 1,800 litres (475 US Gallons) of grow beds taken that the grow beds are about 300 millimeter (12 inches) deep.

Fish vs Liter vs Growbed aquaponics

A system made up of 1x 1,000 litre tank and two 600 litre grow beds will need at least 18 metres square (200 square feet). That is 3 m x 6 m (10 ft x 20 ft). It would support say 50 fish and a growing area of 4 square meters (44 square feet). A system with a 2,000 litre tank (528 US Gallons) will hold about 120 to 240 fish. It will accommodate between 2,400 litres (634 US Gallons) and 3,600 litres (950 US Gallons) of grow beds. A system made up of 1x 2,000 litre tank and four 600 litre grow beds will need at least 32 square metres (338 square feet). That is 4 m x 8 m (13 ft x 26 ft). It will support say 120 fish and 8 square metres (88 square feet) of growing area.

So, depends whether you are building a Backyard Aquaponics System or a Commerical Aquaponics System or whether you have an area that is the perfect place and whatever can fit in will work.

D. Koster


Aquaponics, ækw??p?n?ks, pisciponics

250 liter aquaponics system Cycling with fish

The new 250 liters Aquaponis system was in the making for a while and now its ready. This system was planned to reduce transportation and assembly time. The current system is a direct drain to the fish tank, where the growbed is directly on top of the fishtank.

The dimension of this system is 900 x 900 mm x 300 mm and the fish tank is a 300 liter capacity loft tank that is readily available in the market.

The wooden framework was developed keeping in mind the outdoor conditions and was treated with a PU coat (weather proof sealant).

Once the framework was assembled, the inside was lined with a pond liner.
The growmedia for this system was in two layers .. the lower half was filled with 25mm gravel and the remaining top half was filled with LECA.

For this system i started cycling with fish.
the formula i was following in the past was the same i used here. So what i did was once the system was fully plumbed and the water filled in the fishtank, i ran the system for three days without fish.
Then on the 4th day i added 5 goldfish, and did a water test. After the first week i added another 5 fish and every week gradually i started adding more fish.
The first few weeks you will notice the PH reducing and the ammonia level slowly building up .. once you see the ammonia building up .. its time to add some seeds so that there will be takers for the nitrate when the bacteria start converting the ammonia into nitrite and then nitrate.

Here are the results from the testing that was done in 8 weeks.
you can see the progress gradually.

Early experiments 70 liter Aquaponics using aquarium

When the NFT system started to grow, i began looking up online about aquaponics and came across a lot of content and realised this is a wonderful food production system.

So i decided to try a small growbed system. I had few small tubs and an old decommissioned aquarium lying around and so i decided to make use of it. So first i built a wooden table, just to hold the growbeds/tubs above the aquarium.

After a visit to the hardware store, I created the siphon mechanism using pvc pipes and connected the water flow mechanism whole system. I did not use any taps to regulate the water flow as this was an early experiment. Just wanted to see how basic can this setup be.

My NFT system was giving a bit of a problem and so i decided to transplant all the plants form there to this grow bed system. Since i wanted to remove the NFT system and plan a bigger Aquaponics unit in its place. The transplanted tomatoes started to grow really well. This system has a 70 liters aquarium below the tubs and it has 10 goldfish and a few guppies.

Days, weeks and months later ... lust look at the way the plants have grown and in 4 months time of just feeding the fish twice daily and topping up water as and when the level dropped a little due to evaporation. After this system completed six months i learned a lot about the simple science behind aquaponics, and once you follow those life becomes easy.

I learnt a lot like the right size of growbed, the right growing media and size the water flow rate how it drains out etc. Then i decided to go bigger .. My next project a 500 liter aquaponics setup.

Aquaponics 400 liter barrelponics

This is a 400 liter barrel ponics that i built with two 200 liter barrels interconnected for the fish tank and 2 barrels cut in half to form the 4 growbeds. For the sump tank i used a 300 liter loft tank.
The system was set up some time ago. The build was simple with 40 mm square section of treated pine that was put together with a clever load bearing design the barrels sat comfortably on the frames.


The fish tank was placed strategically under the overhead tanks of the house to avoid direct sunlight and this gives the FT plenty of insulation from the elements.
Bell siphon was put in place and the plumbing was done using 19 mm cpvp pipes with control valves at every water exit point.
Once the system was all hooked up we ran the system for about 3 days for all the dust etc get settled down at the bottom of the growbed and for the water to get cleared.

3 days later I introduces 10 gold fish. This is very less number of fish for this size tank, but this was done because I was looking at cycling this system with fish.

Then I ran the system for a week and added a another round of 10 gold fish. By now a few seeds was also thrown into the growbeds. It took almost 6 weeks for the nitrogen cycle to get established. During this time a few tweaks was done to the bell siphion upstand to get the flood and drain cycle to set well. 8 weeks later the system was running fine and in three months time the system was well set and the tomato plant were already starting to fruit.