Aquaponics+16-17

Welcome to Aquaponics!

Information from last year's team can be found here and here. Some other previous years: 2012 - 2013, 2013 - 2014, 2014 - 2015, 2015 - 2016. This is also a useful explanation of how aquaponics works. A good resource for getting an aquaponics system started: http://injaf.org/beginners-guides/the-nitrogen-cycle-and-the-fishless-cycle-getting-your-aquarium-ready-for-fish/

This years team.

Objective: To create a system successful enough to provide food in a continually changing environment. We want to also grow food to donate to soup kitchens.A lot of research has been put into our project. Here is what we found:

We researched different styles of aquaponic systems. Flood style:

Progress on 1 - 4 - 17

Before vacation, we put more nitrifying bacteria in our tank. As a result, when we came back today we found that our plants grew quite well, though the plants were struggling to stand on their own. To help the plants stand on their own, we cut out plastic cups with holes to support the sides of the plant.



As we usually do when we haven't seen our tank for a long period of time, we decided we would test the water for nitrates and ammonia. We discovered that there was a very large amount of ammonia and not a lot of nitrites, so we know that the nitrifying bacteria must be struggling to survive in our tank. We believe that this is likely due to the water in the tank being tap water, and that perhaps the chlorine killed the nitrifying bacteria. We're not all that worried about the situation right now because at the moment we're more concerned about growing our plants than creating a suitable environment for the fish. However, in the future we would likely need to import water from a successful fish tank and replace our water with less polluted water.

Michael

Progress on 2 - 2 - 17

We restarted our tank completely because we came to accept the fact that if we didn't restart, there just wouldn't be enough time left in the year for the nitrifying bacteria to develop and consume the ammonia within our tank. When we set up our new tank, we used an online calculator to make sure that we put in the correct amount of ammonia and we periodically monitor ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates to check for when we should add more ammonia to our tank. Speaking of the tank, we made many improvement to our design, adding a more compact floating raft, a stand to hold our lights better, and we raised the tank to make it easier to work on.





Michael