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.
ryukoposting 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
slfnflctd 5 hours ago [-]
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.
coffeebeqn 4 hours ago [-]
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
dandaka 2 hours ago [-]
Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.
voakbasda 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
ctkhn 40 minutes ago [-]
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)
vasco 2 hours ago [-]
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.
colechristensen 37 minutes ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
dalbasal 3 hours ago [-]
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.
keiferski 6 hours ago [-]
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.
gus_massa 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dansmith1919 40 minutes ago [-]
Nobody is arguing this will replace farming, nobody disagrees with you.
The point is that it's fun and you learn something.
RobRivera 30 minutes ago [-]
In new york city, the value is managing your sanity
Gigachad 5 hours ago [-]
No one is reading this thinking it’s going to replace industrial farming. It’s just fun
phoghed 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ickelbawd 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
leros 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
projektfu 38 minutes ago [-]
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?
WillAdams 3 hours ago [-]
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):
(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?)
keiferski 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Epa095 2 hours ago [-]
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.
qdotme 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
leobg 7 hours ago [-]
For once a post that’s not about AI on HN’s front page again. And the main comments are about liability risk?
pipe2devnull 5 hours ago [-]
Seriously, this is a cool project and I’m sure the person had a lot of fun which some people are apparently allergic to.
indoorfish 5 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
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 :)
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
inigyou 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
wk_end 3 hours ago [-]
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.
pipe2devnull 3 hours ago [-]
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”
csomar 2 hours ago [-]
You are getting downvoted but your username is "indoorfish" so maybe you know more about this than most here?
4 hours ago [-]
comrade1234 7 hours ago [-]
Isn't weed legal now in NY?
ButlerianJihad 7 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
If you have a profitable project that grows, don't worry about space. The profit (if significant) will cover the cost of more space.
6 hours ago [-]
throw9394999 8 hours ago [-]
> 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).
pipe2devnull 5 hours ago [-]
Structural support in the floor? There are people that weigh more than this. It’s only 20 gallons
malfist 3 hours ago [-]
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
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sokka_h2otribe 2 hours ago [-]
Ok, they also added an entire building on top, not just a pool
cogman10 5 hours ago [-]
I looked it up, you are looking at 160lbs (75kg).
wk_end 4 hours ago [-]
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?
laweijfmvo 50 minutes ago [-]
a lot of landlords ban fish tanks. they can do far more damage than a dog or cat ever will..
bitcurious 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
martey 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rrr_oh_man 7 hours ago [-]
> home insurance DOES NOT cover that
Citation needed. Very bold sweeping claim
projektfu 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
Every apartment lease I’ve signed specifically prohibits aquariums.
throw9394999 7 hours ago [-]
Home insurance covers usual cases like ruptured pipes. It does cover running farm in your appartment!
woodpanel 7 hours ago [-]
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.
throw9394999 7 hours ago [-]
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!
7 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 15:45:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
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.
If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that it's fun and you learn something.
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.
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?)
And as a small aside, idk how one can write sentences like this and not immediately revolt and switch to metric:
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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 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).
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
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.
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.
> 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.
Citation needed. Very bold sweeping claim
Source: https://www.thezebra.com/ask/renters-insurance-coverage-aqua...
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.
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!