plant filter on a budget

[salty joe]

Get a 5 gal. bucket & install a 1 1/2 uniseal near the top as a return to the tank. Install a smaller uniseal near the bottom to recieve water that is pumped from the tank. If the tank & bucket are on the same level, a powerhead would work. Throw in some seaweed type plants-whatever grows the fastest. Illuminate with maybe 70 W HIP on a reversre lighting schedule. Agressive regular pruning is a must. Cut off the old growth & get rid of it.

Joe

 

[Dr Joe]

Seaweed? Are we talking S/W here?

And did you mean HID lighting or just very cool lighting?

Got any pix?

Dr Joe

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[salty joe]

No, I'm talking freshwater. Seaweed was a bad choice of words. Let me grab my book. Cabomba, or even the bog plants that are palmed off as true aquatics might work. My book is old, but an awful lot of the plants have an upper temp range of 68 F. The key is to find a plant that will grow like crazy in the bucket environment and agressively prune the old growth. HIP is high intensity phosphorus, I think. I think that Home Depot carries them. You can also check hydroponic outfits. And remember that light obeys the inverse square law, so a light 8" away will only supply 1/16 as much light as the same light 2" away. A plant filter is real easy and effective. Nothing fancy or tricky, anyone with the talent to keep fish should not have too much trouble. The thing to remeber is if you are not regularly exporting a lot of plant matter, it's not working for you.

 

[King Edward]

Grow food in it....My runnerbeans are coming up like crazy! I can even feed the beans and peas back to the pacu!

 

[salty joe]

Yeah, any plant that would grow fast & let you export nitrogen & phosphate based pollutants.

Need to be careful not to cause a flood. Positioning the feed pump near the top of the tank would be a good start. Maybe the pump at the top of the bucket would be better yet. I'd rather sacrifice a cheap powehead than deal with a flood in my home.

 

[Dr Joe]

How about a link to these lights your using .

Don't mention flooding to King Edward .

Just screen the intake to the pump to eliminate overflow probs.

Anacharis a.k.a. Elodea is a great fully aquatic plant for this (just thin out and start another filter), or Cattails and Iris' roots in gravel and submerge them.

There are quite a few of us using aquaponics on here and or planted refugiums (basically what this is), do a search, there are some interesting variations.

Dr Joe

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[Fish Eat Fish]

This sounds great but IME you need a much bigger container than a bucket so you can grow more plants. Otherwise you wont be able to extract much

 

[salty joe]

. HIP is high intensity phosphorus, I think. I think that Home Depot carries them. You can also check hydroponic outfits.

My bad. HPS is the light that I meant. High Pressure Sodium. If you google high pressure sodium growth lights, you'll get a ton of hits.

 

[invisyblegypsey]

i use a 60 gall rubbermaid tub for my plants and they are thriving

 

[Dr Joe]

. HIP is high intensity phosphorus, I think. I think that Home Depot carries them. You can also check hydroponic outfits.

My bad. HPS is the light that I meant. High Pressure Sodium. If you google high pressure sodium growth lights, you'll get a ton of hits.

That's better, but we need to take the word budget out of the title of this thread (ok the bucket is cheap ).

Now you could hook 4 buckets together and suspend 2 $8 shop lights 6" above them and get very good results.

Dr Joe

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