Aquaponics in Honolulu

This system was built in our small backyard. Plants include manoa butter lettuce, serrano pepppers, tabasco peppers, cilantro, thai basil, hawaiian chile pepper, tomato, habanero, new mexico green chile. There's a u-shaped siphon to control the ebb and flow of the system. There are 7 fully grown golden tilapia and 4 fingerlings. The growbed media is volcanic cinder.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• aquaponics
• tilapia
• barrelponics
• fish
• siphon
• garden
• cinder
• vegetables
• worms
• hydroponics
• aquaculture

[whitenoise135]

An easy modification is to drill around a 1 inch hole about three quarters the from top and install a short PVC pipe with a right angle to allow any water to drain out. You could put a strainer on it to prevent any smaller fingerlings from accidentally swimming out.

[mahalo111]

curious to understand more how the siphon works. Plant health looks excellent. Any added nutrients? How is the systmen operating now after a few months of operation? Nice Job!

[whitenoise135]

Thanks for the feedback. As far as the siphon goes, once the water gets to the top of the inverted "u" in the pipe, the water will drain out of the the grow beds quicker than the water being pumped into them from natural suction of the water discharging into the fish tank. The suction occurs due to the fish tank being lower than the grow beds. The tricky part to the siphon has been getting the correct flowrate from the pump to the growbeds, which affects the flow to the fish tank.

[tetsuzanbennyron]

Mahalo for the video. Dr. James Rakocy and Dr. Wilson Lennard have done a great job presenting at the International Workshop on Aquaponics and Tilapia during August 2010 at Hilo, Big Island of Hawaii. To learn more about the workshop and to watch many free, full length presentations from that workshop go to the AquacultureHub website.

[goforebroke971]

i was just wondering, what happens when it rains? does the fish tank over flow or do you cover it?

[giovanyid]

You can put peppers and spicy pepper too close, sweet peppers will gey spicy.



[GotHawaiiHome]

diggin the setup!!

[DancesWithLlamas]

Hi, how does the siphon recover once it trips? Thanks bra

[SuperSkinnyDip]

Very neat! I've built some hydroponic systems before and grown things like tomatoes and peppers. Love the idea of adding fish into the equation, looks great.

[knowmore09]

Maybe you need to rig up a small canister kinda filter for the fines before the water from the growbed enters the fish tank.

I am thinking a plastic bottle stuffed with hemp or something - which you can periodically remove and clean.

[whitenoise135]

As far as volume goes, each grow bed will have at most 35 liters of water (or 105 total liters) since the volcanic cinder makes up around half of the total volume.

For pH, you can't really see it in the video but I'm using both red and black cinder. Red is a little more basic and black is a little more acidic. The pH as been ranging around 6.7 to 7.5. Now that it's been going for a few months, the cinder has a lot of fines depositing in the fish tank, so not the best media.

[knowmore09]

Scratch that gravel question. just noticed that it is volcanic cinder. Is it affecting you PH?