Phew! The system has finally been set up and the last parts added. Now it’s time to tweak, like for instance reducing noise. Our system is sitting in the corner of our living room so we want it to be as quiet as possible. If it was placed in a garage or greenhouse noise wouldn’t be such a big problem.

The Eheim 1260 water pump was initially mounted on a custom shelf which began vibrating when the pump was turned on, and then the whole plant tank table began vibrating too, causing an unacceptable noise coming from the system. I tried fitting some scrap EVA foam in between the pump and the shelf, but the annoying sound was still present:

A quick and cheap solution was to suspend the pump above the shelf using bungee cords:

The vibrations in the pump simply cannot transfer to the plant tank table structure and the system is now very quiet. (I’m just wondering how the PC performance guys get away with mounting this beast inside a PC without having a lot of mechanical noise coming form the PC. This particular water pump is used for water-cooled PC’s, but that’s another story ). But don’t get me wrong, I really like this pump – it’s sturdy, powerful and stable.

Another small thing left to do before the system was complete was to install another suction hose filter, as this pretty one clogged up in a matter of days:

Fortunately we consume a lot of coriander spice so I found an empty glass where the lid would fit perfectly over the suction hose, and drilled a few holes for the water to run through:

A few holes were drilled into the side of the suction hose to minimize the flow into each hole:

This is to prevent the fish getting hurt if they get too close to the suction hose. The more holes, the better, as the flow per hole will be less, and the fish will be able to swim by without getting stuck.

The water flow is strong enough to keep the lid on the hose:

We have these fish in the aquarium at the moment:

• 2 Firemouth cichlids (Thorichthys meeki)
• 2 Blue Acara (Aequidens pulcher)
• 3 Keyhole cichlids (Cleithracara maronii)
• 4 Bleeding Heart tetras (Hyphessobrycon erythrostigma)
• 2 ‘Talking’ catfish (Platydoras armatulus)

They seem to be happy with their new home (see if you can spot the catfish ):

A box has been built around the plant tank to help the plants in the plant tank receive even more light, by trapping the light in the box until it hits the plants instead of lighting up the entire living room:

It’s actually only half a box with the two walls covered with aluminum foil to reflect the light:

The chives seems to be thriving and growing all over the place.

I was sowing runner beans for 2011 and just for fun I sowed a few into net pots filled with coconut fibers for the aquaponics system, just to see what would happen:

The runner beans grew fast, and of course it’s silly to grow runner beans in a system like this, where you only have 50 cm of growing height (20”), so they soon had to be removed again as they were starting to grab onto the grow light:

The roots looked amazing, and developed very quickly:

I just dumped the net pot with roots into a larger pot, and the small runner bean plant is ready to move outside:

The aquaponics system is completed and it’s time for tweaking.