Vertical Aquaponics Problems Solved

Last year when I built my vertical aquaponics system there were two problems that made it completely unpleasant to work with. Those problems eventually led to me shutting it down by summer. I have since revisited the problems and now have the system back up and running. So far things are looking very good and I'm hopeful I've resolved all the issues. We shall see.

The first problem involved water constantly dripping from the plants and completely missing the gutter that the towers were supposed to drain into. This resulted in me having to top off the system daily with 20 - 30 gallons of rainwater, which at times can be a scarce resource. My solution was to simply create a larger catch basin using a bunk feeder. The intent here is that when the water drips off the plants it ends up in the bunk feeder and not on the ground. The plants aren't quite big enough yet to know for sure, but I'm fairly confident this will work.

The second problem involved the drip fittings constantly getting clogged. This forced me to check on the system at least 3 - 4 times per day. If I managed to miss a clog, then game over for the plants in that tower. I came up with a two step approach to solve this problem. The first was to add filtration. I didn't have any filtration at first since the media in the towers was supposed to provide the filtration/biological surface are for the system. Big mistake! All that fish poop was either getting stuck in the fittings, or accumulating at the top of the towers and causing water to flow out the front of the towers, off the plants, and onto the ground. I added a Matala BioSteps 10 pond filter to the mix. I have a DIY version of this filter in another system and it has proven very effective at trapping large solids.

I also had a very large 80 micron screen filter lying around, so I went ahead and added that too. I'm not sold on that one yet. I'm having to spend about 5 - 10 minutes at least once per week washing the screen. I've added two gauges to the inlet and outlet of the filter that provides me visual indication on when it is getting clogged. Prior to adding the pond filter this thing was clogging daily. I haven't waited for it to completely clog and am proactively cleaning it weekly. Time will tell if this procedure becomes too annoying. I can always take it back out easily enough.

The second step of the solution to solving the clogging issue was implemented by using an industrial vibration motor I ordered from China. I mounted it to a piece of pressure treated 5/4 x 6 decking, and used vibration dampening standoffs to mount it to the wall. The supply line and drip fittings were then secured to the board. The motor is hooked up to a cycle timer that turns on for about 10 seconds once per hour. This literally vibrates the crap (fish poop/solids) out of the fittings. So far I've had zero clogs using this.

It is winter right now here in Texas so I've planted the towers with strawberries and lettuce. The lettuce will be harvested soon and will be replaced with some Pak Choi, rainbow chard, and garlic chives. I'm actually looking forward to the performance of these upgrades. If things work as I anticipate I hope to add more towers to this system and eventually build a much larger system.

Oh, I almost forgot. I wanted to take a minute to thank @squishysquid. Her recent post titled A peek at out Aquaponic tower system, (And a review of Zipgrow) inspired me to write this one.