For starting up your own aquaponics systems, you must first know the equipments needed. Read this post about the equipments needed for aquaponics systems.
Your Aquaponics systems will depend on the bacteria. The bacteria breakdown fish waste and transform it into plant fertilizer and create a perfect balance and synergy between the fish and plants.
The cycle starts when you put the fish in the tank. Ammonia will be produced in the fish waste. Nitrosomonas bacteria in the air will populate the water surface, and start converting the toxic ammonia into nitrites. Nitrites are still toxic, but their presence will attract nitrobacter bacteria. These will colonize your system and convert the nitrites into nitrates, which are harmless to the fish and excellent fertilizes to the plants.
When this happens, you will be able to trace the presence of nitrates in the aquaponics systems. The level of the ammonia and nitrites will drop below 0.5ppm. This will signal that your aquaponics system is now up and running!
The key for starting up your Aquaponics system involves making sure that the bacteria grows and thrives in your system, and you will need to give it some time before the population of bacteria can support fish and plant growth. This will generally take about four to six weeks in total.
Some of aquaponics gardeners nowadays start their aquaponics systems with the “fishless” method. This method will not use fish as the source of the ammonia but using artificial ammonia.
For this method, you will need Aquaponics Gardening Cycling Kits which will provide all the tools for the aquaponics systems.
You can start adding fish once the system is up and running and the bacteria are thriving (i.e. when the levels of ammonia and nitrites drop to below 0.5ppm).
Ok, now, which method is better?
Using the artificial ammonia is safer since there is no danger of having fish dying due to initial ammonia spikes. In order to use the fishless method, what you can do is you can modify the other parameter such as the temperature to the level where bacteria multiply more rapidly at this temperature (typically 77 to 86°F).
You can also modify the pH to about 7 to 8 to speed up bacterial growth and oxygenate the tank as much as possible, for example by using air stones and some kind of water jetting action.
In addition, you can also buy bacterial colonies, which will definitely speed up the process.
Tips:
- Get some filter material or gravel from an established, disease-free aquarium as this will be rich in the bacterial colonies we want.
- Get some rocks and pebbles from a river or lake, but be careful of the risk of introducing disease and parasites.
- Get some filter material or gravel from an established, disease-free aquarium as this will be rich in the bacterial colonies we want.
- Get some rocks and pebbles from a river or lake, but be careful of the risk of introducing disease and parasites.
