How it works

Here's a sketch of a typical aquaponics system and the various components that we made in Google Sketchup.

Open Greenhouse August 15th

The open house on August 15th went pretty well, we had about 40 visitors and everyone was positive about the results so far.
Fish deaths seem to be under control now, we still have a couple of deaths a day but it is much more stable. We are still facing problems with the pump and foot valve, but hopefully this has been solved.
Here are some pictures of the open house.

Fish Deaths

It seems that the water adjustments we made using hydrochloric acid were not that good for the fish. Even though it did bring down the pH to 7, it seems that the 400 fish we put in were not too happy with it. They started to literally rot alive. In the first 3 days we lost over 100 fish and finally changed over 75% of the water. The fish deaths have been going down, yesterday we only lost 6. Still have about 250 fish in the tank, more than enough for aquaponics to work out well!
We have our first open house this sunday at evfuture. August 15th, 4 to 6 pm.

An update after lots of problems

The reason this blog has been silent so long is that we've been dealing with issues. First, the grow beds leaked. We tried various methods of fixing the leaks but finally we had to resort to removing the pebbles and painting the sides with a special waterproofing agent.
Yesterday we finally got the 390 fish. Vici, surya akash and monica took a nice long drive to chidambaram and had to catch the fish ourselves because the workers had not come. So there we were in the little fish tanks at this fishery with big mosquito nets, dragging them across the bottom!
Anyway as of yesterday the avaquaponics system is finally READY!
Photos to come soon...