We all love to have a clean aquarium with a few fish inside it, but cleaning an aquarium, once algae starts to grow using nitrogenous compounds present in an unmaintained aquarium, is a difficult job. Folks over at ECOLIFE Foundation are now trying to couple two of our favorite activities, fish farming and growing fresh herbs, with a new aquaponics kit for aquariums, that uses fish waste and dirty water to grow fresh herbs while cleaning up the water for the aquarium.
Dubbed the ECO-Cycle Aquaponics Kit, the system is designed to be installed on top of a standard 20-gallong aquarium. It comes with a submersible pump that brings in dirty water from the aquarium to a prefilter section where a rinsable and reusable sponge catches all solid waste and then a bio-filter brick performs some biological filtration. After that water is made to enter the grow tray where 13 net pots containing herbs of your choice are present.
Instead of soil, the tray holds clay pellets which serve as a substrate for the plant roots and also offer adequate growing conditions for beneficial bacteria that further perform biological filtration as water flows through them. Finally, filtered water returns to the aquarium through a drain. The developers state that kit requires very less maintenance and the user only has to feed the fish and replenish water that is lost due to evaporation and transpiration.