Introduction

It's been about a month since I was first introduced to the concept of Aquaponics. Amazingly enough (or maybe not), I have never met the person who introduced me to this incredible concept - he's a cyberspace friend from an economics blog I spend probably too much time on. Anyway, thanks JAG for the heads up.

The purpose of this blog will be two fold. The first reason is selfish - to document for myself everything I am doing and how for future reference. The second reason is to help others who may be interested in Aquaponics learn from my experiences, share their own, and overall generate useful ideas and information for those new or old to the field.

There are already a number of websites on Aquaponics, and at least one very useful blog which I will be posting links to. Nevertheless, there are things I have already encountered which there are no easy answers to. For example, I have been forced to design and build my own fail-over switch for my back up pump. I will go into details later in a separate post, but the point is I now have a fail-over switch design that works, has been tested, and is available no where else on the internet that I am aware of. Seems to me like others could benefit from that information.

Like I said, the very concept of aquaponics was foreign to me until about a month ago. In that time, I've built a covered area for the AP system, built supports to hold the growbeds, designed and tested my bell siphons, built a fish tank, and obtained my pumps. The system I am building is for a 1,000 liter fish tank and ten, 100-liter grow beds, all expandable to 1,600 liter tank and 16, 100-liter grow beds. The next big steps on my to-do list are to obtain my grow-bed fill material and buy fingerlings. I've located a quarry near Poas volcano that sells crushed volcanic

rock which should function well. There are local Tilapia hatcheries in the country which, while I have not contacted them, I assume will sell me all the fingerlings I want. I estimate I will have a functioning system within about 2 weeks.

What I will be doing on this blog is documenting as much as possible everything I do. I can already tell that aquaponics is absolutely amazing and want to share what I learn with others.

Now, I am new to hosting a blog, so please bear with me while I figure out how this all works.