Monthly Archives: December 2010

Choosing a Water Pump for Aquaponics

Posted on by
Reply

I think I have finally found a suitable pump for our new aquaponics system. Not that the MD5 pump won’t do the job, but I haven’t found one for sale in Europe. The pump I found earlier is an internal one and the head of the Fish Department (my girlfriend ;-) ) would prefer if the pump was placed outside the fish tank to get a cleaner look, and I agree so I was off to find an external pump. People around here working with aquariums refer to such a device as a “bucket pump” so I searched different forums to find a local shop where I could buy one.

I noticed the pumps in the web shops were usually divided into three groups; internal, external and power heads. I was concerned by the fact that most of the pumps are described as filters, and sometimes equipped with UV-filters, because I want the plants in the aquaponic system to do the filtering, not some device.

Fortunately the third group, the power heads, or the circulation pumps is what I was looking for. I don’t think the purpose of these devices is to do any filtering, but time will tell since there’s a small built-in filter anyway.

The Eheim 1260 is available locally and even looks like the MD5 pump:

Here’s the performance chart for the Eheim 1260:

The Ultimate Aquaponics Home System guide that I’m following suggests “~6 gpm capacity across ~5‐7 feet of head” and the chart above shows about 350 gph at 5 feet of head. That’s 350 / 60 = 5.8 gpm at 5 feet. It’s priced at USD 150 – we have a winner ;-)

Early Potatoes – Part 2

Posted on by
2

My potato growing experiment is going really well. The small potato plant is growing like crazy beneath its 36 W neon tube grow light. This picture was taken 14 days after I covered the lonely tuber with dirt:

After a thorough hoeing the stem is covered with dirt:

Hopefully this will encourage the plant to develop more tubers below the surface.

Fast forward 3 days and now the plant looks like this so it’s really growing fast now:

and after another round of hoeing the stem is covered again:

It wouldn’t be practical to put on more dirt now so I’ll leave the plant alone now until it’s time to harvest the new tubers. The foliage looks healthy, with a dark green color and I’m getting excited to see the result.

Maybe I’ll experiment with pollination later on to see if I can get the plant to produce potato seeds for next year, but for now it would be great if I could just get some tubers some time in January.

Assembling the Aquaponic Plant Tank – Part 2

Posted on by
3

I like working with MDF boards (medium-density fibre boards) because you can cut out sharp and clean edges that’ll fit together perfectly:

It’s easy to drill holes for screws and the screw heads can easily be buried resulting in a cool overall look of the aquaponic plant tank:

The tank is heavy though, maybe a bit more heavy than with ordinary fir. It seems quite robust – and it should be with all those screws I used ;-) (28 pcs.). Luckily the plant tank table I built is also robust – strong enough to keep the plant tank filled with water up above the top of the fish tank in order to create a natural flow of water from the plant tank down into the fish tank:

Now I need some plastic foil to keep the water inside the plant tank and a pump to get the water up there in the first place.