Good evening! I'm so glad to see this forum topic. I am in the loooong process of building an off grid home and I want to integrate aquaponics somehow into my system. It's rainy season right now so i'm working on catching all the rainwater I can for next year. This month I'm installing tanks, making a 'pool' and running
irrigation lines
underground.
I am recycling all my grey water to water plants right now.
I planned on having a fish tank (one if those white cubes that liquids are shipped in) under the house and running tubes from that up and into a channel along my front window, and behind my kitchen counter for growing herbs. I was going to use pumice stone as the medium because they wash up on the beach when it is windy. But I'm not sure if its ok to have the grow beds (the rain gutter in my kitchen) that far away from the fish tank. (Imagine a triangle that's 5 meters long on 2 sides - which are the tubes from the tank under the house, and one side is almost 8 m long - which is the channel/rain gutter in front of the window) So the whole system spans about 20 meters in a loop. Is it still possible to do aquaponics over this distance? Since the tank is under the house, I wonder how much sun or light do the fish need? Maybe it's overkill? How large should/can a grow bed be for a 1000 litre tank? Or how large a bed could a 1000 litre tank support?
My other option is to go big and line the big hole (4x4x4 meters) behind my house and use that as a big fish
pond, and cycle the water from that down to the
greenhouse and back? The
greenhouse is about 10 meters away and down the hill from the
pond. Is it possible to have a closed aquaponics system when the components are all spread out in my
yard? I'm using rainwater that I collect from the roof but we only have rain for 4 months a year. How can I keep the pond clean? I was also hoping to use the water in the pond as my backup reserve (if needed) for dry season. Would that hurt the fish if the level of water is slowly decreasing? What's the minimum depth the fish would need? Also I have dogs and I know they'll want to swim in the pond, can the fish and aquaponics system handle that? I'm getting
chickens in a month too, can they work into the system somehow too?
I know this is a super long email, but I super excited about this part of my construction. Thanks in advance for your ideas!
