NYC Apartment Aquaponics

Summary

About two years ago, my awesome boyfriend John and I set out to create an aquaponics system in our one-bedroom NYC apartment. Since my first post was more of a chronological journal about the build (and we’ve learned A LOT since then), I hope this one will serve as a practical guide for replicating our setup and avoiding our mistakes! Aquaponics 101 Aquaponics combines aquaculture (breeding, rearing, and harvesting water organisms) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil). Frequently, this is done in large-scale industrial farms where both the plants and animals are raised for food, though there are many thriving online communities of home aquaponics enthusiasts. There are many different kinds of aquaponics systems, but (to the best of my knowledge) they all share the same cycle: fish waste water provides nutrients to plants, which in turn filter the water. Despite the abundance of online resources, when John and I first became interested in setting up a home system, we noticed most examples still used tanks and grow-beds that would be far too large for our NYC apartment. This has motivated us to share our experiences, and we hope that this guide may be useful to others looking to create a similar setup! This guide consists of the following sections: Our System: a high-level overview of our current system design Recent Improvements: highlights of what we have recently changed compared to our initial build Lessons Learned: mistakes we learned the hard way Step-by-Step Build Guide: if you too want to be a city aquaponics farmer! Our System We opted for a media-based aquaponics system, which means our plants are housed in a separate grow-bed filled with clay gravel. Water from the tank is pumped through the clay substrate, where the rooted plants filter out nutrients from the fish waste. Additionally, we opted for a continuous-flow system, which means that water is continuously cycled from the tank through the bottom few inches of the media bed before draining ou...