Is this your first system? I like it a lot.
Very fucking cool, I especially like the addition of the worms and the NFT tower, with some tweaking that could be used to go vertical in an indoor room, which would be great for the crazy hobby-ist. I'm going to include some information about my system in case anyone cares/ is interested. I'd also love to help spin the wheels and get more people using aquaponics as I seriously think it's the future of this industry.
I'd suspect your lack of mechanical separation allows you to maintain a higher EC. My tank is fed quite plentifully I have 3 axillary fish tanks of shell dwellers, guppies, and sword tails, snails, plants, and shrimp are also introduced when I have an abundance along with veggies, fish fillets, "frozen" shrimp, beef heart, and daily pellet feedings. Since no food is lost in your system it's just a matter of time until the worms reclaim the food. Absolutely brilliant, I hate you slightly as I wish I tried it myself. I'd be very scared to not mechanically filter my water as much as possible though due to the sediment ending up in the root zone and killing my plants. I suppose you could approach it slowly as you should, and just increase the fish counts and feeding slowly until you reach an equilibrium, but who has time for that? My very stocked 90 gal tank (less when you consider flourite, drift wood, and slate rock) maintains a EC of 1.1 or less.
The addition of worms is a very clever idea, I learned most of my technical information regarding aquaponics from Breeder Steve and 10k on forums, those bastards didn't mention anything about adding worms to the clay! I already had a background in fish keeping and hydroponics so I just dove into it and I found out very quickly there were problems with design as you need a very large biofilter and I also ran into issues with not removing enough solids from the water. I imagine the worms would help greatly for removing the solids from the water. I'm sure they don't have to eat much, so you could do both. Have you tracked how much you're feeding your tilapia or what your worm population is? Tilapia are supposed to excrete 1/8 of the food given as waste, the rest is turned into flesh. I think a balance could be made between the two. I might have to experiment with this with my hobby garden.
I'd love to see more pictures of the NFT tower btw, I really like that design, it adds excitement to a sometimes dull hobby.
I wonder if worms would be able to live in my system, for my mother plants I have a similar system Breeder Steve wrote about, it's essentially a sump fed siphon action (I didn't drill this tank, 1 of 3) the sump is divided into 2 sections the section to the left is fed via the siphon from the tank which is poured through sponges/mechanical filter material, I have a few of these built so I can just hot swap them as needed. Below is the actual sump tank which is approx 65 gal but has much of the bio filtration (bioballs, clay, sponges) and additional aeration. The left side overflows into the right side which has a pump, float valve, a grate to hold more balls over top it's sectioned as 1/3 so it holds 20 gal when empty but returns about 7 gals whenever the float valve kicks on. Sump side 1 has a pump that feeds my hydroponic systems.
For mother's I just have a normal tray that feeds back into the reservoir. The part that I stole from Breeder Steve is the bucket design, I made mine far more simple and just have a 9 buckets, all with netpots filled with clay, which are drip fed there's also airstones in the bottoms of each bucket which lets the roots below live in a DWC environment. The buckets have an overflow around the bottom of the netpot to keep the clay not submerged, but it's always wet due to the wicking action. The overflows just pour out into the tray which drains into the reservoir.
My flowering is a system I stole from 10k, it's a recirculating shallow DWC, it's a tray with a cover with netpots in it, with clay in the netpots, constantly filling and draining. I've experimented with wet/dry cycles but couldn't find anything that worked out to be better.... so far.
Do you have plans to adapt this to an indoor system?
Do you think worms could survive in my system? I think it would be great to pull them out once in a while and feed them as I'm rather lazy keeping my worm bins and often let them "finish" where the worm castings end up like mud but all my worms are dead. So I order a few lbs of worms a couple times a year.
Have you tried mixed medium? Breeder Steve would use an inch of worm casting rich potting medium ontop of his clay which he could start seeds in, I believe he had his drip lines inside the clay so this would end up bottom fed. I only do this when I want to start seeds in my mother farm. I'm scared that the worm castings would pollute my water too much and I don't want to lose some of my fish. In a 90 gal I keep around a dozen tilapia, 1 oscar, 2 green terrors, 1 fire mouth cichlid, 1 green severum, 2 red sevrums, 3 gold severums, 2 red jewels, a pictus catfish, 6 bichirs, 6+ silver dollars (these guys get killed off but I love them), 16 clown loaches, maybe about a dozen other various loaches, 1 common pleco, 1 pineapple pleco, 1 vampire pleco, I constantly introduce snails, shrimp, plants, guppies, and replace fish that die (due to aggression, not pollution). Many of my fish are sensitive to N, I had 22 clown loaches originally but some died early on. I've also killed all the inverts in my system by a suspected copper overdose.
I have 2 hobby aquaponic systems that are essentially my veg system, I filter a 110 gal with 16 piranha and a 55 gal exclusively tilapia, I've kept as many as 80 adult tilapia in this one, and removed countless babies. Yeah that's right, fish counts exceeding 6"/gal didn't disrupt breeding. Right now both of these have been moved and need to be setup again, but I don't know if I have the room. Most of the tilapia are now fillets.
I've pretty much settled on these 2 designs as they offer a biofilter, re circulation, and a balance of plants at different stages of growth to avoid treating the water. Now I want a cool ebb and flow system with a NFT tower. Damn you!
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