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Fish : Plants is an important ratio. You can always lean a bit heavy on the plant side and foliar feed some maxicrop if they're a bit deficient. If you lean the other way the fish will not like it. Note you're really balancing the fish metabolism against the plant metabolism - so the rate you feed the fish affects this as well as the number of fish, and the amount of light and vigor of the plants affects it as well as the number/size of vegetation.
Tank volume: Greater water volume provides more buffering capacity. Safer to have more water than you need than too little.
Biofilter: Extremely important. Am I to understand you didn't have one, Sputnik? If that's the case I'm not surprised your system never worked. The nitrification cycle is a core-component of aquaponics. Like the water volume, bigger is better as it will provide more stability. If it can't keep up the fish will poison themselves with their own ammonia.
you must have wrote this while iwas typing my epic lol
great info cctt and your spot on with everything sounds like you may be more experienced than i am with my one grow under my belt :)
as for balancing the fish and plant ratio i seem to have gotten lucky and nailed it first go but i was schooled that you check your nitrates in a perfectly balanced system nitrates will read just above 0ppm. 0ppm means that the plants are taking all the nitrates form the water. in a perfectly balanced system the plants remove all nitrates without themselves becoming hungry and i was told that if you aim just slightly above 0ppm then you can see that the plants are removing pretty much all the nitrates but you can also be sure that you are still providing enough nitrates for the plant where as if it read zero all the time then you would have no idea that your balance was off until the plant let you know. it seems to be working so far