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Who cares?

When you buy a couch, are you thinking "will this couch offset the value of the square footage it occupies" or "will this couch be comfortable and match my décor?"

I'm glad someone is doing something fun in their home.

Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense.

Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.

It makes me a bit sad that even with modern tech we haven't really made it much easier for people to produce their own food. But it's a reminder that our food production requires large scale collaboration and cooperation. Maybe that's a good thing.

People seem to think you’re attacking the article. I read the article but know nothing about aquaponics otherwise, and I was wondering why we don’t see it used more. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on the subject.

So... This is more comparable to a guppy tank than a farm.

Generally, yes you are right. Home farming (eg vegetable gardening) generally isn't economical. That doesn't mean it's not valuable. Besides being fun... I do think home gardening some resilience to the food system.

Aquaponics is, in general, not really a viable commercial method. Or rather, the plants are just a filter for the pinds...not a true secondary product.

Still... aquaponics is fun.

By this logic, doing anything yourself is inefficient and a waste of time.

However, I think that by reducing it purely to a monetary number, you are not measuring things correctly. Part of the output of doing DIY things is the knowledge, experience, and fun that comes from doing it. If you insist on putting a dollar sign on that, I’m sure it ends up being much more equal.

It's less about the square foot economics for at-home, and quite often the time to travel between growing space and home, if in the case of an apartment, it was somewhere else.

In new york city, the value is managing your sanity

No one is reading this thinking it’s going to replace industrial farming. It’s just fun

Yeah. Just think about how much smaller of an apartment they could be living in.

Nobody is arguing this will replace farming, nobody disagrees with you.

The point is that it's fun and you learn something.

Because gallon of fuel weighs 6lbs!

As a scientist and an adult immigrant to the US, I came to appreciate both systems as useful for different objectives.

Celsius/Metric is neatly rooted in science - where it truly shines by removing /most/ of the conversion factors (but does it? we still have, today, speed of light that should be 1, Avogadro and Boltzmann constants are just odd numbers you memorize too) - but doesn't match neither everyday weather and life (0F being "coldest you'll experience in a place humans commonly live" and 100F being "hotest", and close to wet bulb temperature and, through a fluke of an undiagnosed fever of Fahrenheits' wife, nice threshold for fever).

Fahrenheit/Imperial is actually relatively convenient to machining, industry and agriculture (but not engineering or science) - how much of that is actually fractional measurements (1/16th makes a ton more sense than 0.0625), and how much are the "fingertip/decent meal/daily water intake/sustains a person" idea of an inch/lb/gal/acre.. is quite intuitive. Far more so for composite units. 1 PSI is intuitive - you know what force to exert at what area of a piston, same for torque'ing to 80 lbs-ft.

But.. it makes a ton less sense when you separate N from kg (yeah, I am a physicist, I know why, it just makes less sense when building stuff in a dirty corner of an industrial revolution), then somehow apply it to a whole square meter to get a Pascal, and now you need decimal fractions of a million of those.. to represent what you actually see. Quick, do you think you can plug a 2cm diameter garden hose at 0.5MPa with your thumb to spray your dog?

CGS system was quite popular and useful, IMHO for that reason, at the time when Europe was actually manufacturing stuff and inventing them in barns and factories. But it was essentially "neither" - bastardization of sacred kg and meter - lost to SI.

US keeps inventing and making stuff in garages and fields.. and it shows in its devotion to imperial system. But I can see convincing mechanics to 1/8th of a cm and 40g way before I can see them taking up 1.25 mm and 0.04 kg.

I agree that starting with DWC is the right call. Finding a balance with fish is a bit of an art and a very slow process. It's harder still when you don't know what that balance should be, how intricate the systems really are, how unstable the cultures can be at first, etc. I also wouldn't bother trying with a tank any smaller than 10 gallons, but I'd prefer something more like 70 gallons with a heavy stocking ratio. The extra volume gives you a lot more stability in many regards.

In my experience, DWC systems support plants fine without the pumps. I used them for years before trying Kratky, and sure enough, the plants still grow. This might vary by species. I have had pump failures as well, but never more than 36 hours or so. In any case, it wasn't enough to harm the plants.

An aside: I just looked up Kratky (to be sure I had the name right) and the image results are pure insanity. AI generated nonsense. There's one where the image generator used perfectly clear containers and included some sliced limes in the media, haha. And soil.

Starting a hobby like hydroponics will probably be so confusing with garbage like this all over the place.

edit: The lime-aid dirty Kratky system

https://easyhomehydroponics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/c...

Battery backup pumps are cheap so that helps

Whwre does aquarium come from?

Seriously, this is a cool project and I’m sure the person had a lot of fun which some people are apparently allergic to.

> If I were their landlord, I would dread finding someone running this kind of crap.

I'm not aware of any new york apartments I've lived in that forbade having pet fish or plants.

If you have a profitable project that grows, don't worry about space. The profit (if significant) will cover the cost of more space.

Structural support in the floor? There are people that weigh more than this. It’s only 20 gallons

> If tank fails, you are liable for water damages and home insurance DOES NOT cover that.

Whether an aquarium is covered by home/renters insurance is specific to the policy and aquarium size, not consistent enough to make statements like this. This aquaponics system is essentially a planter on top of a low stock aquarium.

I will say that the shelf supporting the aquarium seems inadequate to the job, increasing the risk.

Having a fish tank for fish is a normal enough thing and carries similar risks of water damage, doesn't it? Does this strike you as significantly higher-risk, less insurable, or more irresponsible than that?

This is covered in the post (emphasis mine):

> With similar concerns in mind, we also decided to limit the tank size to 20 gallons, as the grow-bed above also contains an additional ~10 gallons of water. Since a gallon of fresh water weighs roughly 8.34lbs, we estimate this puts the entire weight of the system’s water somewhere between 170 and 250lbs. Considering the weight threshold of the industrial shelving, and given that we live on a high floor in our building, we decided to constrain the system to this size to minimize the flooding risk.

> home insurance DOES NOT cover that

Citation needed. Very bold sweeping claim

And people are wondering why being landlords is often such a bad investment.

Imagine the lawsuit if you rent out an apartment that you own, and your „very intelligent“ tenant produces water leak damages, in a nyc high rise with potentially ALL owners underneath you affected.