Aquaponic install - First attempt

I have been gardening for a couple years now, mostly container gardening, where you build containers, add soil and plant something every square foot. I usually built the framework of a box and sat it on the ground. I would put down some weed guard underneath before I added the dirt to keep weeds out. It works pretty well, but because I built them on the ground, you still had to bend over to work on them, not a big deal but still not optimal for a lazy person such as myself. In any event, in my reading of gardening ideas, I came across the idea of aquaponics. Basically it works out like this. You have a large fish tank, the fish excrete waste and ammonia into the water. Now if left alone this water will eventually become toxic to the fish, the waste would kill them, so we have to have some way to clean the water, in comes the plants. See, when you set up a plant bed in aquaponics you use growing media, not dirt. You can use pea gravel or lava rocks or any of a number of media. In any event these beds will develop bacteria, this is good for a couple of reasons, the bacteria will work on the fish waste and turn it into fertilizer for the plants to use as food and by removing the toxic fish waste, it purifies the water so it can go back into the fish tank. 


That's the basic concept, in reality it mimics an ecosystem, all things in  balance, just like nature. It's interesting to me that as we become more advanced we find ourselves looking more and more towards to nature for a template of how to do things. The fish waste acts as fertilizer for the plants and the plants in turn purify the water, via the bacteria that transfers the waste into nitrates. This system uses 1/10th the amount of water of standard gardening as all of the water is kept in a closed loop for the most part. You will have some lost to evaporation but on the whole it is far superior in terms of water usage as compared to standard farming. As a side note, the latest revolution in solar energy actually mimics the actions of leaves on a tree. One day we'll be able to cover windows and glass doors with a translucent photoelectrochemical film and generate electricity as well as still see through the film.


So back to aquaponics, I am going to try to document my successes (failures as I see fit, haha) so you can see how easy it is.... or how much fun it is to laugh at someone who has no clue what they're doing. I'm still in the design phases but here's what I got so far:


Fish tank- Found one of those 330 gallon totes on craigslist for $75.00. Here's a pic of what they look like.

I am going to cut the very top off and I should have about 300 gallons of water space. I had planned on trying a smaller tank at first but someone off an aquaponics forum advised making the fish tank as big as possible because a bigger tank makes the system more tolerant of mistakes. Apparently the smaller the system the more a small mistake can have catastrophic results. On a side note here, it is important you know what was IN these totes. You want to make sure it was something safe

Grow Beds- I found a guy down the road who has food grade plastic barrels for $12 each, that's a really good deal as most of the other places I found them were a) out of town and b) $20. Plus the guy has hundreds more. I will be cutting these in half and filling them with pea gravel as my grow media.

I may cut them in half horizontally, I have been told that works better if I use the type of drainage method I want to use.

Fish choice- I think I'm going to go with catfish. Tilapia are the standard choice since they are very tolerant supposedly of mistakes in water quality. But I know I like to eat catfish and I always like to be a little different anyway. Heck, I might even through in a few freshwater shrimp if I can find some the catfish don't eat.