NYC Apartment Aquaponics | Hacker News Reader

NYC Apartment Aquaponics

erinmurphy.dev

194 pointsmm111982 comments

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.

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.

Yes, when you decide to buy a couch it's because you looked if it's the best use of the space you can do.

A couch is more comfortable to sit on that an hydroponics system, all else being equal. I’d pick the couch every time.

I always grow some kale in my house just because it's a fun thing to do.

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.

There are a lot of cool growing technologies but it’s really hard to beat the sun and rain and soil on cost. Once you go inside you have to provide the medium, the energy via lamps, watering system and all the micro and macro nutrients. Gets more expensive naturally

Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.

As a small farmer, I will tell you that, without exception, home-farmed food is immeasurably better than the food in grocery stores. Appearance, taste, nutrition are all superior to store-bought equivalents. Cost is the only metric where store bought food wins.

Yep. I grow around 1/3 of my food and most of my produce in the warm months. I have put a lot of effort into selecting flavorful varieties and making a flavor assisting soil medium. I cook based on what is available at the time.

It's a lot of work and not terribly cost effective (if you count labor) but it's also fun work.

But the real payoff is the quality of the food and it feels kind of weird sometimes, like, I'm not uber wealthy, I'm not a movie star nor famous person and yet this is possibly some of the highest quality food available I'm eating. Flavor and probably nutrition as well.

I made this eggplant parmesan last night and everything in it but the salt and oil and breading was from my garden. The tomato sauce, the herbs, the garlic, everything. All fresh picked that day. It's unbelievable how delicious it was I really wish I could share the experience.

Store produce seems like a ghost now, like this faint shadow of the taste produce should have.

100% with you on the taste and nutrition. I think you forget sustainability at scale. I love the idea of eating local food, but with current levels of personal productivity and home-farmed food costs, there is no way it could work for all of us.

It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do. It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)

1. Tomatoes off a vine crush anything in a u.s. supermarket.

2. I eat unwashed basil leaves and other greens growing outside, I eat them by first putting them under my tongue, my seasonal allergies (I am allergic to everything but mold) have plummeted over the last 3 years of this. The folk remedy of farmers market honey did nothing for me.

I did sublingual drops a decade ago and there was moderate improvement but for medical reasons I can't get a prick test again and I haven't been able to find a provider that will just make drops for me based off my original prick test.

It's impossible to find what plants capture the most environmental allergens on leaves or in edible flowers so I just have a collection, I figured that made more sense than licking a swamp cooler.

Anyway, I've gone from taking Allegra most days to only 2 months out of the year.

The idea of self sufficiency either from individualism or associated with a sense of "being prepared" is enticing. But growing something yourself is also cool in itself. Watching a plant grow, eating the tomato you grew tastes better than the one you bought.

If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.

I think the problem is that a lot of soil here in the US isn't up to the quality of other countries. It may be tastier and healthier to eat imported tomatoes than ones that we even grow ourselves.

It gives you a sense of control, for one. I could repurpose existing software to do most of the things I program myself on my own time. Ikea is way cheaper than most things you can make yourself, but you end up planning around commodity furniture instead of getting furniture that fits your plan.

An inordinate amount of the benefits of specialization is sucked up by middlemen leaches and enshittification is very real in the physical world too.

A lot of "specialization" looks more like enforced helplessness where the world around you seems to be full of mysterious magic outside your one specialty and often your specialty is very many levels of abstraction away from anything obviously useful to an end user (i.e. some brand of navigating office bureaucracy).

Many things aren't actually all that hard to do yourself nor do they take up all that much time or energy. And there are many things which aren't actually possible to distribute to end users so what's possible by yourself is so much more than what's possible to sell.

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.

Can I agree with both?

One one hand it's a fun DIY project for some people.

On the other hand, every other year somone rediscover vertical farming that makes no sense except for very niche products.

I think you missed the part where I said I built the same system and enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.

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.

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

> no one reading this

So probably 99% of the users are clicking directly to the comments and upvoting the inane GP comment to the top, and the “no one reading this” is actually almost no one.

The article itself is clearly just a hobby learning fun project.

No one reading it /here/. People pitch this stuff all the time/

In new york city, the value is managing your sanity

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.

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

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

You have no clue about the armies of people online who think hydroponic home farms will be a serious and significant source of food then.

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

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.

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 appreciate your defence of the indefensible :P

I accept that psi is more intuitive in many cases than Pascals. But I remain unconvinced about Fahrenheit. I reside two places during the winter. One has temperatures around 0C, and the difference between -1C and +1C is much more important than the difference between -1F and +1F, it's the difference between rain or snow! The other place regularly sees temperatures around -25C. In both places -18C is just some random uninteresting temperature, letting it be 0 is... disturbing.

> 0F being "coldest you'll experience in a place humans commonly live"

It gets MUCH colder than this all the time in the northern US, let alone Canada and Alaska, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc.

Well, where? I live in MA, lived in NH and visited MSP quite frequently, also spent a winter in Toronto… but even a quick search suggests that in MN it “dips” to negatives Fahrenheit, occasionally, with monthly Jan averages in low single digits.

Most of inhabited Canada is a thin sliver by the US border, or coastal which stabilizes the temperature around freezing quite well. Ditto with Norway.

Can you share a good example of a large (say 500k+ metro area, the “commonly”) city that actually dips below 0F daytime regularly? Murmansk comes to mind.. maybe..

What I was responding to:

> 0F being "coldest you'll experience in a place humans commonly live"

Using US and Canada cities, here are the top 10 places at or below 0F a year:

Fairbanks, Alaska — ~115 days

Yellowknife, Northwest Territories — ~103 days

International Falls, Minnesota — ~57 days

Grand Forks, North Dakota — ~55 days

Winnipeg, Manitoba — ~52 days

Regina, Saskatchewan — ~50 days

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — ~48 days

Fargo, North Dakota — ~42 days

Thunder Bay, Ontario — ~40 days

Williston, North Dakota — ~39 days

> Can you share a good example of a large (say 500k+ metro area

I've lived in over a dozen places in North America but only 1 time was it in a place with over 500k.

There are ~ 52 cities in the US and Canada with a pop over 500k. Those 52 cities make up 0.2% of all incorporated cities and towns. Over 75% of US towns have less than 5k people. The US is a country of small towns.

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?)

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.

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.

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

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?

Whwre does aquarium come from?

Latin, but it doesn't have mixed roots as a word.

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.

For once a post that’s not about AI on HN’s front page again. And the main comments are about liability risk?

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

It's just not very interesting as a whole. A quant and his programmer gf living in ny stack 3 fishtanks in a rack. It's questionable why it's even on here at all.

I don't care about the rest, but "stack 3 fishtanks in a rack" is interesting enough to read about to me. I upvoted it, maybe just to spite you :)

Rack plan:

HU 42: TOR switch. 41-40: management server (2U). 39: git server for `fish` (1U). 38: build server for `fish` (1U). 37-28: fish (10U). 27-24: plan9s. 23-14: plants. 13-5: plumbing. 4-1: UPS.

Don't put your UPS under a fishtank, folks. It becomes an IPS when it gets wet.

> Don't put your UPS under a fishtank, folks

You know, maybe I should reconsider having my UPS at the bottom of a rack that contains one server in the middle with liquid CPU cooling... Or just add a liquid sensor between them somewhere perhaps.

Eh, it's probably not that bad, especially if you have more stuff in between. How much liquid is in the server?

Contrary to popular belief, one drop of water on the case of an electronic rarely breaks it. You do need to get a substantial amount inside the electronic to break it.

I remember building a water sensor kit as a kid and going to the bathtub to try sensing water and my mom rushed in and stopped me because I was putting electronics near water.

also... if your server's leaking you probably don't care if the power also gets interrupted.

Unless the UPS catches fire, which would be bad.

You could put some absorbent or barrier material in between for paranoia. Don't need a whole new rack, although you could.

Disagree - engineers documenting fun and quirky DIY projects is very much in the hacker spirit. Before reading this I didn't even know aquaponics was a thing, much less a thing with a "thriving online community".

...also, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but why not "a programmer and her quant bf"? She's the one who wrote the article on her own blog, and this is primarily a community of programmers.

To each their own but I thought it was a fun post. I enjoyed seeing a post that wasn’t “AI is terrible” or “Everyone should use AI for everything”

You are getting downvoted but your username is "indoorfish" so maybe you know more about this than most here?

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.

Isn't weed legal now in NY?

> 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).

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

As someone who has over 800 gallons in aquariums between three tanks in his house, I'll say structural support is not as important as people make it out to be (ask an actual structural enginer). Anything up to 120 or so is just fine hanging out on a floor without extra support.

Also steel is completely unnecessary unless you're doing something wild like that guy in NYC with a 17,000 gallon home aquarium. If you're just throwing a 200 gallon or so on a second floor, an enginer might not care at all if its across the joists or has a wall below it, but even if its completely open below, the "support" might just be a joist of a different design, or an inch thicker or one extra joist. Steel is really not nessecary

But big tanks do need extra support. This is a relevant thing to post in case someone is thinking about scaling it up.

The Pfizer building in NYC almost collapsed after they tried to build a swimming pool on the roof. This happens semi-regularly when building owners ignore, or don't consult, engineers about rooftop swimming pools. Every owner wants one and doesn't want to be told no.

"almost collapsed"? Probably an overstatement.

If anyone wants to read more about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer_Building#Structural_det...

    > This happens semi-regularly when building owners ignore, or don't consult, engineers about rooftop swimming pools.

Another wild overstatement. Yeah, I'm sure the city approved this office to residential converstion with a rooftop swimming pool that has no engineering analysis. "This happens semi-regularly": Can you provide other examples? I couldn't find any with a cusory Google search.

Pretty sure the pfizer building was vertical expansion without reinforcement.

I dont think they got to the pools. I worked for a company that did a bid for the electrical work. Edit: there was a pool. Didnt have on plans at time

Second edit: looking at wrong plan. There was a pool but it was basically a blank plan with annunderdesigned roof.

Ok, they also added an entire building on top, not just a pool

I looked it up, you are looking at 160lbs (75kg).

> 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?

a lot of landlords ban fish tanks. they can do far more damage than a dog or cat ever will..

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

It is most likely covered (in the US?) unless it was leaking from negligence or was specifically prohibited in the lease. Obviously, read your policy and your lease for details.

Source: https://www.thezebra.com/ask/renters-insurance-coverage-aqua...

Every apartment lease I’ve signed specifically prohibits aquariums.

Home insurance covers usual cases like ruptured pipes. It does cover running farm in your appartment!

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.

I think landlords are not liable in this case. It is like if tennant sets building on fire. It just violates all sorts of codes.

For landlords worst are dogs. With wooden floors soaked with acidic urine, all surfaces scratched and chowed. Thanks to ESA bs, you can not even charge extra security deposit or extra rent! And normal tenants avoid your building, nobody wants to live in laud smelly zoo!

A few years ago, I read in a book that it is feasible and safe to manufacture colloidal silver at home using electrolysis. I was intrigued, because my father had conducted many similar projects with success, in the kitchen, in the garage, and in the backyard, as he worked for EH&S. The Dunning-Kruger swelled within me.

I reviewed photographs of the home lab setups, and I evaluated ingredient/supply/equipment lists. I even inquired at my credit union's branch whether they could sell me silver bullion, which was hysterical in retrospect.

Then, as I slept on it a few nights, I had nightmares of this electrolysis lab just getting out of hand, taking over my bathroom (where there is actually no space for anything else) and just ruining my dull, ordinary life. I don't even have any roommates or family living with me here.

So of course I decided not even to try this. This NYC apartment seems similarly constrained. If I were their landlord, I would dread finding someone running this kind of crap. Insurance and liability are the biggest problems here. They should go purchase a home if they want to play around.

> 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.

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