Anyone using Aquaponics?

I have a new set up for my grow, basically I am growing 1 plant, SOG, using CFL's, with aquaponics as my growing method.

The turtle/fish, poop, and that "dirty" water is pumped down into my rock reservoir, where bacteria collects on the rocks, and allows nitrates and other stuff to be produced. Then that water/nutrients gets siphoned out to my plant chamber, where there is a constant flow of new water coming in and going out.(the picture will explain more later) While in this chamber, the "dirty" water gets filtered by the plant, and gets siphoned out to another reservoir, where the clean water collects and waits to be pumped back out to the aquarium. Thus creating a cycle.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone uses this method. A plus is that it is all organic, and you wont ever have to buy nutrients.

Oh and a rough, computer drawn sketch of what it looks like, I can't upload my camera photo's at the moment.

How are the plants liking it? Do you have something in place to strip ammonia and sodium? Do you have your aquarium inhabitants on low-salt foods? If so, have you noticed any fungal infections on your fish?

The bacteria takes care of the sodium and ammonium, as it turns it into nitrates. I have gold fish and a turtle living in the same tank, they seem to be doing fine. I feed the fish just commercial grade food, and the turtle eats the fish, and vegetables I grow for him.

Oh and the plant seem to be really happy

Cool. Did you have to buy a bacterial culture to start, or are they just naturally occurring in your system? That's really an interesting step that a lot of people forget in aqua systems.

Well what I did is I put a seperate chamber before the actual plant chamber with a rock medium inside, and have the polluted water flow over that, and as it does that, bacteria forms. The bacteria stay in the area of the rocks because I guess they attach themselves to it.

As you can see in that picture, there is a little cylindrical chamber above on the top right, which holds the rocks and bacteria.

Howdy- cool experiment.

Just to have mentioned it, I'm not aware of a pathway to eliminate sodium build up in a dead-end system ( not closed, as you're feeding constitutes a system input). Yer pulling very small amounts of NaCl out as plant compounds, but I suspect that you'll have long-term accumulation issues. Yer looking for NaCl in ppm concentrations, but the feed yer adding contains NaCl at part-per-thousand levels. ( Trust me on this- there's no commercial feed available in the world that doesn't have problematic salt levels for this purpose. Pond based aquaculture actually depends on a considerable amount of flow through to keep the envionment sub-toxic.)

I'm also thinking that yer looking @ P defs in flower and Fe problems cross the board- Fe almost unavailable @ pH which will allow for un-stressed fish. Too much stress and you lose that part of the cycle- Fish don't eat.

The turtle's a neat twist, and might actually be enough biomass to get this to work, but I'd watch out for big swings in N level- a single turtle prob defecates/urinates more than the #/weight of fish that the tank could support, but it's in big spikes instead of a slow averaged release. I'd be worried about fungal infections (of the turtle) if you let the tank stay dirty enough to support rapid plant growth.

Have a look @ open cell foam as a filter media- shitload more surface area than rocks. Be nice to get full conversion on one pass thru the filter. Yer filter'll be happier if you can set up some kind of rain box/ spraybar arrangement, or otherwise aerate immediately pre-filter.

Lemme know if I can help with this- I've actually done a bit of it.

So what your saying is I need something lower in PPM concentrations of NaCI, since goldfish eat plants, I could feed them lettuce bits which are naturally low in sodium. Maybe that would be the key?

As for the fish though, I keep about 7 in there, and have to get new ones almost every week because my turtle eats EVERYTHING, he used to have a turtle friend, till he ate him. I call him Mr. T.

But as for my tank being dirty, it is looking pretty crystal clear right now.

I'll look into that foam stuff pretty soon though, probably after this harvest.