shinester
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China's white trash
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Post by shinester on Feb 18, 2014 21:21:35 GMT 10
Aquaponics
What is it?
You feed fish > fish poo > the poo feeds your plants
You feed the fish in the fish tank, they poo in the water, the poo partially dissolves and the plants take up this nutrient.
I've done LOTS of research into this, with pages and pages in a spreadsheet about different aspects and every technical detail I wanted to know. There are lots of benefits to the system, certainly if you want to eat fish its better than other systems, but what I see are lots of shortcomings to aquaponics in terms of self-sustaining and a preppers point of view. As a hobby, its fine and fun. I see the fun and interest in it. I'm also looking for a self sustaining lifestyle in time [5-10 years] so that I have systems that require minimal input and produce all that I need without having to 'need' inputs externally, which is it's biggest flaw.
power for the pump - most systems, especially flood & drain, need a decent pump drawing about 36W. Doing this with solar needs a rather big panel to give the power it needs even if it's running 30 mins on [flood] and 30 mins off [drain] during the day and 15mins flood/45mins drain at night needs a 240W panel batteries etc to suit. Not ideal for costs and that panel's power would be much better suited elsewhere.
fish food - most fish need good quality fish food which is made mostly from fish-meal [dead fish]. Sure you can have a HUGE supply of fish food to feed the fish to get around this limitation in a SHTF, though there's no chance of resupply. You might as well just keep tinned fish, because it's more convenient and almost cheaper. If you're catching fish to feed fish, err.. wouldn't you just eat the fish you catch? It's much more expensive, at about 6-10 times more expensive/kg than grain and the meat/kg of food you get from rabbit and chickens are fairly similar [maybe 10% better with Tipila which we can't legally have in Eastern Australia], so no real advantage. Grain also keep much longer, you can eat them yourself and if you sprout it, will be more nutritious for the animals. I suppose combining rabbits with plants may be the go.
Some ideas on this are
Black Solider fly - Yes you can feed and they are awesome at conversion but the sums of waste versus production even when include human poo as a food source [and they do a great job at it btw] puts you at a deficit for food. Having said that I would definitely add them to the diet, though fish 'still' need the fish oils so it can only suplement their diet.
Insect traps - A good idea and a good addition to any fish's diet, because frankly it's one way they feed themselves anyhow. The power to run a fan and UV light goes back to the power for the pump problem [drawing more than the pump]
Duck weed - only good for omnivores [Silver Perch being the best one] - you need a really decent sized pond to grow enough duck weed to feed your fish, though it is again a good supplement. I would fertilise with pee, provided the pond was big enough. Problem down south is it stops growing when cold.
Breeding
Carp and Tipila are realistically the only breeds you're going to get to breed in aquaponics and they are noxious fish in all of Eastern Australia, so you won't be keeping them legally. You 'might' be able to coax it out of trout by doing it by hand but trout are troublesome because they die very easily at higher temperatures and are carnivores. Almost all people with Aquaponics get new fry every season.
Fragility
Loose a pump and your fish will die VERY quickly [in an hour], even with solar and hopefully you're running some redundancy and have spares. There's things I've thought about to mitigate this, such as using an air-pump to move water [no moving parts in water so will last longer] and this would help the solar panel question also in certain circumstances, but fish are prone to problems with pH, the amount you feed etc causes problems, you get deficiencies in the plants etc. Having a varied amount of food again will help reduce these problems, though you are at the mercy of the weather. The best fish are the ones we can't have of course.
Sustainable/SHTF?
To make it almost sustainable - Tipilia, big solar power system to suit [500W] running the 36W pump and insect catchers, feeding human poo to BSF [and then feeding BSF to fish] and growing duckweed in a spare pond with some fish oil thrown into some feed. Must live in up north also for insect life and efficiency of system. Oh and throw in some iron, they're usually in deficiency.
and this is why I am currently moving past this and looking into
- Rabbit > ponics - using rabbits to feed your plants, their poo goes to the plants
- chickens and foraging - letting chickens mostly feed themselves through growing plants they can eat
- Pee-ponics - using pee [and some wood ash] to feed your plants - pee is an almost complete fertilizer, adding some wood-ash will boost it for flowing/fruiting. You can grow enough for a pee-ponics set up of about 7sqm/person, which will give you more than enough veggies over the year.
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Post by Nex Socius on Feb 22, 2014 10:14:05 GMT 10
Thanks for this post, it's a good weigh up of the pros and cons.
My plans for this would be hobby based, and hopefully preserve the fruits and veg that I manage to grow. The risk of fish dieing is very real and is one of the variables that makes this a not-so-great plan for if SHTF.
I saw a setup on tv, which had chooks housed above the fish pond, with a wired bottom - their poo falls thru the wire and feeds the fish (I see this as becoming very messy, both for the pond, water parameters and mess in general). I've also heard that chook poo is used to feed trout in trout farms. Not sure on the validity of these claims as I haven't done much research yet.
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shinester
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China's white trash
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Post by shinester on Feb 25, 2014 3:01:23 GMT 10
- I'd totally go the hobby route, planning to do so myself at some point. Pee-ponics is just organic hydroponics using your pee, which happens to be an excellent fertiliser that has been used for eons. Sure you can also use Seasol if you don't want to use pee. Coupled with a low power pump [low head, high volume] or something like an air-lift pump [very low head [1"], very high volume/watt[1000lph/5W] and a solar panel you will get excellent growth rates and outputs/space. Water use on a 900Litre system averages out to 23L/day including a 1/3 water change [300L] once a month that you could pour onto a traditional garden. This is to keep the saline levels down. Obviously you could go traditional hydroponics, but this has the disadvantage of more water use and changes, needing resupply, though for a years worth of fertiliser it doesn't cost much if you make your own. backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2534Wick beds, look very promising, though I have yet to do a good amount of research on them. They look like a zero power alternative that's easy to get going. Stocking inorganic fertiliser is easy and cheap enough as mentioned above or you could use pee and woodash obviously too. The downsides might be the lack of medium for the ammonia in the pee to properly be transformed into nitrates useable by plants but your traditional soil would likely work in this area. Adding compost to the soil would also contribute to maintain soil quality. Remember plants take out nutrients, we eat those plants [and cut away scraps] and unless you're cycling in external food into compost or external nutrients into the soil, over time it will deplete and your plants growth will suffer. The growth rates and outputs will be not as good for the area as hydroponics/pee-ponics/aquaponics but has some advantages in ease of use and assured reliability. If pee is used as a fertiliser, 1/3 of the stored water will have to be drained monthly [put on garden] to maintain good salinity levels. As I'm not completely familiar with this type of system, there may be other details I have yet addressed. Hydroponics without electricityThis is completely new to me, but looks like an excellent option! |
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myrrph
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trying to figure out how to change my nick :P
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Post by myrrph on Mar 6, 2014 19:17:11 GMT 10
fortunately for me, tilapia is found in abundance in my country. It was introduced in the 20's or 30's by the Japanese. Hence the degratory term "Japanese Fish". And they're so hardy and breed so fast.
Unfortunately for me, land is really scarce here in Singapore so having enough land to build 2 ponds is likely to be out of the question. SHTF situation, I'm converting the Kitchen Toilet into my growing area, because its the _only_ place with sufficient Sunlight (I know its strange, you almost have to be here to understand). I will instead be using 2 3Ft Fish tanks with Solar Pumps.
I am still planning some but this is the way I'm likely to be going. and Tilapia is easy to feed. bread, duckweed (harvestible from a pond near my home), pigeon meat would all work.
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shinester
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China's white trash
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Post by shinester on Mar 7, 2014 2:37:13 GMT 10
Yeah, I think in a tropical region [as you are] then you're closer to making it could work with the Tilapia, they are hardy like gold-fish, can live in low oxygen, are omnivore eat well in your temperature region and self breed which is essential! You can have really tall tanks for the fish and stick most of the grow beds on the top. If you have something like ICB tanks over there they are ideal and cheap [use food grade!]. You can have one as a tank and split another one into two for grow beds positioning them mostly on top [leave a space to get to the fish].  I'd also look at some insect catches [UV light and fan], especially in the tropics as you have tons more of them and perhaps alone they could provide a lot of the food. I wouldn't rely on the pond nearby as you might not want to leave home in SHTF and if people are hungry as demonstrated in Leningrad they will probably eat it as well as any animal, pigeon or not. I'd also suggest black solider fly to process your own poo and then feed them to the fish, this will put nutrients from the plants back into the chain. I did mention in your thread about pumps about what I thought about the ones you listed. I think it's no where near big enough to do the job and it doesn't run at night, this is especially an issue during summer. Many systems can't have their pump fail for more than 60mins before the fish start to die [related to how many fish in a given amount of water] Solar, I still think the way to go is to have 500W and run a decent sized pump 35W if you're doing flood and drain, especially if space is an issue as you can put the fish tank below the grow beds. Otherwise you might get away with a low-watt, low-head height, high flow pump, seen some ok ones with about 6W doing 600L/h or an air-lift pump with a similar performance and better reliability. It would use more space of course. If you had a pump with a really high head height you could run vertical towers which are awesome for small spaces and will grow more/area.  -------------------- Having said that, if you used the second solar pump you listed in a small system with a 'few' fish you might get it to work. The problems and things you will have to watch are temperature changes [small systems change more in temps], oxygen levels at night [no pump working] which won't be an issue until the fish get bigger and the usual problems of having to keep the system 'JUST' right in terms of ammonia/nitrates. |
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