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- Hacker News
- > in our one-bedroom NYC apartment ... Bigger tank = better
If tank fails, you are liable for water damages and home insurance DOES NOT cover that. We were flodded by neighbours, the damage was $20.000 in cheap east europe commie block.
Plus bigger tanks need structural support in floor (steel beams).
by throw9394999 - 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.
by woodpanel - > home insurance DOES NOT cover that
Citation needed. Very bold sweeping claim
by rrr_oh_man - 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.
by martey - 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?by wk_end
- > 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.
by bitcurious - Structural support in the floor? There are people that weigh more than this. It’s only 20 gallonsby pipe2devnull
- Isn't weed legal now in NY?by comrade1234
- Fun project! But with that tank uncovered like that and sitting in a closet look out for mildew and mold to grow in your closet.by ickelbawd
- For once a post that’s not about AI on HN’s front page again. And the main comments are about liability risk?by leobg
- Seriously, this is a cool project and I’m sure the person had a lot of fun which some people are apparently allergic to.by pipe2devnull
- I had a very similar setup in my college apartment. The main difference is that I had two shelves of plants in shallower tubs. I grew a ton of micro tomatoes and herbs. It was awesome.by leros
- I know the ship has sailed, but wouldn't something like "zoohydroponics" be more descriptive than just changing from Greek-rooted hydro to Latin-rooted aqua?by projektfu
- Whwre does aquarium come from?by knollimar
- I recommend starting with deep water culture if you want to get into this sort of thing. Aquaponics is like hardcore mode. Shopping for fish so that you can grow plants is a really neat idea, but not where I would start if I didn't want to get frustrated in a hobby setting. DWC becomes very stable once you learn how to properly inoculate the plants with beneficial fungi. Just make sure you have a contingency for power outage. The only downside is that mature plants will die very quickly in this system if the air pump fails. A lot of what you buy can be re-used for the other kinds of systems.by bob1029
- Battery backup pumps are cheap so that helpsby nothercastle
- 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...
- My favorite part of Gibson’s Count Zero was always the hydroponic gardens covering an entire floor of a New Jersey housing complex. Probably not as realistic as the setup in the link, but both are still very cool ideas.by keiferski
- I can still remember ads for the "Biotron" flourescent grow system in various magazines back in the '70s --- the ad featured roses, but of course the actual usage was typically for growing marijuana. (Later that name was co-opted by the Micronauts toy line/comic books for a character).
The O Garden seemed an interesting modern spin (couldn't resist the pun):
https://www.coolthings.com/ogarden-rotating-indoor-planter-w...
(but I think they went under? The footprint was kind of extravagant)
I still think someone needs to work up a unit designed to fit next to a refrigerator --- bonus points for circulating filtered air so that the heat from the fridge is harvested for the plants.
The other option I've been curious about is a window unit mounted like an in-window air conditioner (maybe you could combine the two? harvest the condensate and heat for the benefit of the plants?)
by WillAdams - Cool project. I wonder how large a tank you need to get room fle aquatic animals you would actually eat.
And as a small aside, idk how one can write sentences like this and not immediately revolt and switch to metric:
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.by Epa095 - 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.
by qdotme - I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project.
But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home.
This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentucky land. Then you pay $170 a year to power the system for again, 1 square meter.
Meanwhile the 1 square meter produces like less than $100 in annual produce.
Green house farms like in the Netherlands have perfected this growing method and it’s quite effective. Home food production is a joke by comparison just like home anything production of a commodity product.
So fun DIY projects but as a serious way to grow food it’s terrible, not economical or sustainable. I tore down my project the same year I built it, taught me a lot but made no sense to continue.
by NoLinkToMe - 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.by j45
- In new york city, the value is managing your sanityby RobRivera
- No one is reading this thinking it’s going to replace industrial farming. It’s just funby Gigachad
- 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.by blanched
- 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.
by keiferski - 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 dalbasal - 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.
by slfnflctd - 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.
by ryukoposting