My DIY Aquaponics Aquarium Project

okay YouTube what I'm working on today is one of my DIY projects I've been meaning to get to for a while experimenting a little bit with uh aquaponics an aquaponics system what I've done so far is set up a small aquarium tank on my back patio I've set up two bubble sticks in there just because this airator pump has uh two lines to it um I'm bubbling the chlorine out of the water right now I just use tap water and I'll be adding some fish to this tank later on today uh what I'm planning to do is do a styrofoam float bed on top and uh with just pots in it probably grow lettuce and some floating plants I'm trying to complete this project mostly from materials I have laying around the house so I took some extra Styrofoam insulation board I had in the garage and then I thought it was a tossup between the clear uh punch glasses or the Solo cups to use as grow pots um or net pots homemade ones so what I did I needed to cut out the right size circles and basically I just traced a circle around both the Solo cups and the punch cups which both ended up being the same size and then I traced the inner diameter of each one as well or the inner uh circle around each one trace it out and figured out I needed about a 3-in circle um what ended up being the perfect size was a tin can from the pantry so I emptied out a tin can and used my heat gun here to heat up the can and a hot pad uh and just went ahead and melted it that way so for demonstration so for demonstration purposes I've heated up this can what you do is you just heat it up real hot push it down on the foam board push it all the way through give it a little twist and then I'll have to break it out and so when we remove the can got to use two hands here leaves us a nice clean hole in the styrofoam for our cups okay so that brings us back to the aquarium out here we've got our foam board or lettuce wrap cut so let's check our fit here should slide just inside the tank so that it actually floats on the water and it does okay so with that in place now we're taking to making the net pots out of the Solo cups which I've chosen to be best for the job so basically I'm just going to take a hot soldering iron here I'm going melt a series of holes I figured this was better than trying to drill holes because the plastic is kind of brittle and it might break or tear this seems to work really well and efficiently [Music] okay so I've finished going around the cup I've got holes all the way around it and in the top so should allow plenty of room for the roots to uh grow and move through the holes now we're going to test these cups in our raft up here they fit pretty nicely down in there so here we are with all of our uh grow pots or net pots that we've made on top of the floating raft for the aquarium uh I've got it under a shaded portion of my patio uh so that it doesn't get too much sun I don't want the fish to overheat during the daytime I'm going to try to get some heat tolerant fish to put in here and hopefully we can create a sustainable system okay so a little bit of follow up on yesterday I've actually got the tank set up now with h three goldfish an algae eater and a snail in there just for starters um I tested the water yesterday and it had a very high pH I got it down to a neutral 7.0 uh reading and added some aquarium rocks to the bottom of the tank um my clay Pebbles came in yesterday so I went ahead and uh started out with these plants uh that are not seed from seed I went ahead and got some plants and washed the soil from The Roots uh put them in the clay Pebbles just to start out and kind of test this system a little bit I'm sure there's going to be a lot of trial and error at first um now this one I did start from seed that's an avocado and it's actually got a root down to the bottom of the cup already but it was started about a month and a half ago uh it's been just sitting in the window seal in a cup of water so we got rosemary uh experiment these two are little plugs of Rosemary that I got off of that that hopefully they will take and uh start growing and then of course basil um this is just kind of the beginning of it I'm going to start some seeded uh lettuce here in the next couple of days and see if I can add that somehow to this system if these start to do okay