stutter said:

the bio filter doesnt need plants it simply has to house the bacteria. so im thinking it could pump through a biofilter to 2 seperate rooms with RDWC in each no dramas. there are some epic commercial DWC aquaponics grows out there, mostly lettuce and stuff but yu can easily learn from those and see how they do it.

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My thought was to run my veg in the bio filter table, since my bloom is all rdwc. The water would run from the veg/biofilter table and through an rdwc before being pumped back outside to the fish tank.

ttystikk said:

My thought was to run my veg in the bio filter table, since my bloom is all rdwc. The water would run from the veg/biofilter table and through an rdwc before being pumped back outside to the fish tank.

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so how would you run the veg side of things? simply transplant out of the grow bed into DWC that could get complicated after a few weeks of veg? i would imagine it would be easier to just set up your veg area DWC straight away then you could simply move the net cups or bucket lids with the plants straight over to the flower room when ready?

please forgive me if im missing something thats probably staring me right in the face... i am prone to missing the completely obvious at times ;)

Currently, the veg is in 4.5" pots until time to pot up, which is an 8" net pot bucket lid. Only the final stage before boom is in rdwc, the rest being in ebb n flood tables.

I'm convinced that one big secret to yield is to be sure the roots are strong, healthy- and plentiful. I'm thinking that using the same pots, but burying them part way into the stratum so they can push roots faster.

oh yeah healthy roots healthy plants. when you have a 50l grow bed for one plant in aquaponics and you still have beautiful white roots growing out the bottom into your fish tank you know the plants are loving it.

Goldfish use those types of root mats to breed in, too.

ttystikk said:

I'm trying to figure out a system where the solids go from fish tank to biofilter- which would have plants in it- to rdwc with flowering plants in it, and back to the fish pond via a sump reservoir that would store excess water in the system.

I'm still working out how to set things up so that losing power at any single circuit breaker doesn't lead to a big-assed flood in my basement!

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There are SO MANY ways to work that out it's stupid. I personally will approach it from a refugium stand-point. If you want to know what that is, go to WetWebMedia.com, look up what the Bobster, et alia have written. Biological filtration will occur anywhere benthics can reside, so you can have a biological filter with the fish, with the plants, and in between. The limiting factor will be food for said bio-filter. It can be above the growing area, below it, to the side--wherever you like.


I see stutter has also mentioned turnover rate, and in fishkeeping this is vital to remember or there will be issues between biological load and the system's ability to handle it.

Seamaiden said:

Goldfish use those types of root mats to breed in, too.

There are SO MANY ways to work that out it's stupid. I personally will approach it from a refugium stand-point. If you want to know what that is, go to WetWebMedia.com, look up what the Bobster, et alia have written. Biological filtration will occur anywhere benthics can reside, so you can have a biological filter with the fish, with the plants, and in between. The limiting factor will be food for said bio-filter. It can be above the growing area, below it, to the side--wherever you like.


I see stutter has also mentioned turnover rate, and in fishkeeping this is vital to remember or there will be issues between biological load and the system's ability to handle it.

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He may have mentioned it, but he didn't explain it. Could you?

"It" being turnover rate, or how to situate the biological filter bed?

Seamaiden said:

"It" being turnover rate, or how to situate the biological filter bed?

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Turnover rate. If I need to turn over a 250 gallon fish tank hourly, does that mean a 250gph pump?

Edit; tell me about situating the biofilter bed, too!

The short answer to your question is that generally, yes, to turn over a 250gal tank 1x/hr, you'd need a 250gph pump. The caveat would be at what head (height). If the pump is 250gph @0' head, then you need to keep it above or level with the water body it's pumping. Most (decent) pumps will have a chart that gives you GPH ratings at various head (heights).

Turnover rate in my world depends on what you're keeping--specifically saltwater or fresh (or brackish). Salties require at least 3x/hr, 5x is much better and a lot of fish really appreciate 'The Toilet Bowl Effect.' Seahorses and jellyfishes are extreme exceptions to this, you'll kill them turning over the water at that rate. Freshies are 1x-3x total volume/hr. This is because the salt isn't displacing sites for O2 and other molecules to reside.

A lot of this also has a lot to do with the biological load, and this is where I don't have great experience--creating a plant load that is so much heavier than the fish load that I have to add food. Usually the issue is the opposite, people want their tanks absolutely FULL of fish, just like they see at the shop (not ever thinking, Gee, these fish aren't in these tanks for very long, and maybe they're getting water changes several times a week) which usually leads to a horribly polluted system and fish death. In the aquaponic scenario, the goal is to grow plants, not fish, and so the challenge appears to be providing sufficient nutrient levels to the plants.

Seamaiden said:

The short answer to your question is that generally, yes, to turn over a 250gal tank 1x/hr, you'd need a 250gph pump. The caveat would be at what head (height). If the pump is 250gph @0' head, then you need to keep it above or level with the water body it's pumping. Most (decent) pumps will have a chart that gives you GPH ratings at various head (heights).

Turnover rate in my world depends on what you're keeping--specifically saltwater or fresh (or brackish). Salties require at least 3x/hr, 5x is much better and a lot of fish really appreciate 'The Toilet Bowl Effect.' Seahorses and jellyfishes are extreme exceptions to this, you'll kill them turning over the water at that rate. Freshies are 1x-3x total volume/hr. This is because the salt isn't displacing sites for O2 and other molecules to reside.

A lot of this also has a lot to do with the biological load, and this is where I don't have great experience--creating a plant load that is so much heavier than the fish load that I have to add food. Usually the issue is the opposite, people want their tanks absolutely FULL of fish, just like they see at the shop (not ever thinking, Gee, these fish aren't in these tanks for very long, and maybe they're getting water changes several times a week) which usually leads to a horribly polluted system and fish death. In the aquaponic scenario, the goal is to grow plants, not fish, and so the challenge appears to be providing sufficient nutrient levels to the plants.

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Aha! Specifics I can sink my engineering formulas into... very nice!

So in my case, freshies. Not sure salties and plants are even compatible?

I'm shooting for 500 gallons of tank volume, like an old hot tub, or at least a 250 gallon stock tank. A friend mentioned digging a plastic pond tub into the ground... not this boy! I'm too old for that kind of hard labor!

So my whole op is in my basement. I want to have a constant level outlet on the fish tank, so it can't empty and flood the basement/beach the fish! For this, I'll drill a hole in the side of the tank at the intended water level (high as possible), put a standpipe in that sucks from the bottom of the tank and goes up and through the hole. Preventing the siphon effect will be a small hole drilled in the standout at the exact height of the water level. Cover the hole? It drains. Hole opens? It stops...

This drains to a table for my veg. How big (minimum size) should this table be? My current thinking is to pot my baby veg plants, then cram those pots down into the biobed. Pull them up and transplant into 8" netpot bucket lids in 2 weeks, stick them back in the biobed.

Toughest part of the whole exercise is how to integrate my floor standing RDWC into the rest of this system.

I'd like a sump tank for excess water in the system, but it has to be at the bottom... the return pump to the fish tank outside would be in the sump tank.

Very low salt solution could work, EG Sea-90 at hydroponic rates (something like 1tsp dry matter/gallon water). Nothing lives in completely pure water, ya dig?

I think you may also want to peruse reef or planted systems that include a sump and/or refugium. A refugium would be where you would house your bio-filter most easily. Being as it's only a biological filter bed, you wouldn't need to light it as many refugia that are utilizing macroalgaes do, because the purpose of the macros is to utilize excess nutrient load. There are indeed saltwater vascular plants--mangroves--and there are indeed people rockin' them. These areas are generally fishery nurseries, where you'll see larval and older forms, as well as lots of sponges, hydra, anemones, bivalves, filter-feeders mainly.

In a freshwater environment, that role can be played by many plants, including many popular houseplants such as Syngonium. Or, even better, cannabis.

Now, remembering that I only have experience in the aquatic side of things and not marrying aquatics with hydro, I personally would contrive to disturb the biological filter bed as little as possible. That means I personally would not bury the plants or situate them within those beds, I would site them remotely so that only the same water column is passing through the filter bed media and the plants, in whatever order. You see, the plants will also be achieving some filtration in this scenario, and depending on direction of flow, I can see them being able to utilize both NO3 and NH4. Every time you disturb the biological filter bed, you're pressing a reset button, so it's really better to leave it as undisturbed as possible. If it needs cleaning ever, I wouldn't ever do more than 1/3 of the total volume at once, and I say that because I've killed too many fish doing more.

Your biological filter bed can be as simple as a large trash can filled with gravel of graduating sizes and sand, trickling downward and then pumped back through the system. You just need a pump that can do the job, Iwaki and Little Giant are two faves of mine (and the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, probably other public aquariums as well). I would go with external pumps in this scenario.

The standpipe you're describing sounds like how we did the filtration at Petschmo HQ distribution center. Kind of like Durso standpipes, but we really didn't care about the noise. All 700 freshwater tanks and 300 saltwater tanks were tied to the same systems. Did you know that you can walk on a row of aquariums? You can step on an aquarium, too, even as small as 10gals, you've just got to do it a certain way.

So, what you'll really need in this setup is an automatic top-off rigged up, otherwise you could end up killing some equipment due to evaporation. I figure given how low you've been reporting your local RH to be that you could lose a LOT of water just to evaporation, and an auto top-off would save your skin there in a big, big way.

Oh my God, I just thought about our ENTIRE BASEMENT SET UP AS A FISHROOM!!! Just the thought gets me giddy, can you believe that?



Giving it some thought, and I'd like stutter to confirm or deny whether or not this is a workable solution, I would place the plants between the fish and the bio-filter, so that the plants can take up as much of the available nutrients as possible BEFORE they're processed by the bacteria.

So.... Fish --> Plants --> Filtration --> Fish

Make sense?

Very interesting stuff!

I was thinking of using a 4x4' ebb n flow tray as both veg zone and bio bed. If this proves insufficient, I could easily double its size. The baby plants would be in their cups, then transplanted into 8" netpot bucket lids. I based this idea on pictures I've seen of aquaponics systems that combine their hydroton based biobeds with their growing trays.

I would very much like to add snails and worms to my filtration system, and feed these to the fish.

I could ALSO use my sump as a refugium, and yes, that's where my auto top off will be set. I have a 1/2 hp Flotec pump that needs rebuilding, but is otherwise perfect. It will pull from the sump/refugium and pump to the fish tank (outside? Covered? Summer hits 105, winter can touch -20). The fish tank is the top of the system, I'm planning to use gravity to move water throughout the rest of the system.

The pump will run continuously to continually supply fresh water to the fish, oxygenation, filtering- and with temperature management; in cold weather, when water from the tank is COLDER than 60 F, it will run through a water to water heat exchanger that will pick up heat from my chiller based water cooling system and deliver water to the biofilter bed. In summer, if the fish tank exceeds the maximum temp setting (70? 75?), a thermostat will kick on active cooling in the fish tank, in the form of a jet pump bubbling the water and/or an evap. fountain. In this way, I will never need to spend power to heat the fish tank, and it will all but replace the need for cooling my op throughout the winter!

you might be talking about something similar to a modified chift pist system



in the chift pist the pump is in the sump and is pumped up to the tank. the tank uses a solids lift overflow which actually draws from the bottom of the fish tank. it would then cycle through your system back to the sump before starting over. in this system the water in the fish tank is always the same and only the water in the sump goes up and down.

ignore the fish in the sump in the pic as there normally wouldnt be fish in the sump

stutter said:

you might be talking about something similar to a modified chift pist system

View attachment 329285

in the chift pist the pump is in the sump and is pumped up to the tank. the tank uses a solids lift overflow which actually draws from the bottom of the fish tank. it would then cycle through your system back to the sump before starting over. in this system the water in the fish tank is always the same and only the water in the sump goes up and down.

ignore the fish in the sump in the pic as there normally wouldnt be fish in the sump

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EXACTLY the diagram I had in mind, only the fish tank will be outside and effectively one floor above everything else.

Hmm... temp control for me has always been ambient temperatures. At Petschmo we did use literally a water heater for the freshwater system, but during winter it was very inadequate, we had problems with the poor little tropical fishes at 60*F. Goldies can certainly take that, though, but I don't know about tilapia. I'm sure trout and those types of fish would appreciate that cooler water column, IIRC they actually like it better around 55*F.

<sigh> My poor husband. You guys know what he's in for, because I HAVE AN IDEA.

Seamaiden said:

Hmm... temp control for me has always been ambient temperatures. At Petschmo we did use literally a water heater for the freshwater system, but during winter it was very inadequate, we had problems with the poor little tropical fishes at 60*F. Goldies can certainly take that, though, but I don't know about tilapia. I'm sure trout and those types of fish would appreciate that cooler water column, IIRC they actually like it better around 55*F.

<sigh> My poor husband. You guys know what he's in for, because I HAVE AN IDEA.

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My friends have already sighed, rolled their eyes and resigned themselves to my next nutty idea, lol

pulled a couple of sample buds from the aquaponics today. smells good and looks reasonable. my coco grow was definitely frostier but then it was grown under 800w of CMH too while this was grown under 400w of HPS. anyway it looks nice enough for me

Oh, NICE!!!! Can't wait to hear how it tokes, too. And you can chill out with the fishies while you're toking.

I think you mentioned you're using goldies. Have you ever seen the videos on training your goldfish to do stuff like play soccer or basketball? Pretty cool, fun, funny and amazing, all at the same time. They're at least as smart as a chicken.

Lemme find a video for your entertainment. :D

^^ Seriously.

thats too funny :)

Seamaiden said:

Oh, NICE!!!! Can't wait to hear how it tokes, too. And you can chill out with the fishies while you're toking.

I think you mentioned you're using goldies. Have you ever seen the videos on training your goldfish to do stuff like play soccer or basketball? Pretty cool, fun, funny and amazing, all at the same time. They're at least as smart as a chicken.

Lemme find a video for your entertainment. :D

^^ Seriously.

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It seems I've been underestimating my fish dinner's intelligence for awhile now!