The week that we launched our Bathtub Aquaponics Kit Alan took a phone call from a woman in the San Francisco area. She told him about her enthusiasm for aquaponics and that she was especially excited about creating an aquaponics system in her backyard using recycled bathtubs. She told him how she got the bathtubs, set them up in her yard, and then went off to Home Depot to get the plumbing parts she thought she needed… and that’s where the trouble started. She had no plumbing background, and couldn’t find anyone at the store that could wrap their minds around plumbing two bathtubs together into a recirculating plant and fish growing system. In exasperation she went home and called her plumber for help. Her plumber found us and our kit on the internet.
Without a doubt, DIY aquaponics is the foundation of the backyard, home aquaponics movement. Most of these early pioneers are men (this mirrors the Aquaponic Gardening Community where 78.5% of members are men) who are typically between 40 – 55 who have either been a gardener and/or involved with fish and want to grow food for their families. And most of them are tinkerers. They love taking on projects, improving things, and reusing discarded objects.
But this doesn’t describe everyone. Some of us (dare I say ‘some of us women’) want to garden using this incredible technique, but we are honestly intimidated by aquaponics how to – designing and building our own system. We didn’t grow up with ‘shop class’ and helping our dads around the house. Or we did and just never took to it. Some of us just don’t have the time to design systems, find plumbing parts across multiple sources, and research the best way to pull it all together. If we want to enjoy our own aquaponics system we either need to find a handy friend or find an easy to assemble kit where all the research, design, and sourcing, have already been done.
This week at The Aquaponic Source we will be launching our newest DIY plumbing kit. It is modeled after the IBC tote system that Murray Hallam built in his excellent DIY Aquaponics video. You supply three IBC totes, some lengths of pipe and lumber, media, cinder blocks and a pump and we supply the rest. We’ve done the hard work for you so you can have this 275 gallon aquaponics system with 42 square feet of growing space up and running in a few days, and know that it will work well from the moment you first turn it on. Or you can try to figure it out on your own. The choice is now yours.
