Aquaponics - Explained

In my first post I explained in a nutshell what this phenomenon called Aquaponics is. Well today I am going to go more in detail about the specifics on how it works.Just to refresh your memory I'll explain the basic once more. Aquaponics is a joining of aquaculture(fish) and hydroponics(growing plants in a soil-less environment). It is what   I consider to be the closest thing to actual organic that our society will ever get and I will explain this later. An Aquaponics system starts out with a fish tank which is normally placed on the floor due to weight and how drain systems are designed. This tank can be made up of anything. I have seen old food shipping containers used. They are made up of plastic with a metal cage and are about 300 gallons. I have seen 10 gallon fish tanks used. Regardless of what is used to hold the fish its whats inside that is treated like gold in the Aquaponics community. The type of fish is also up to you. What fits your needs? You have to take a lot of things into consideration also when deciding on what type of fish you will use. What type of environment works best for what fish. What temperature are you going to keep the tank at. I will have a fish guide up hopefully soon.Common fish species used are Tilapia, Rainbow Trout, Perch and many others. It doesn't matter what kind of fish you use but end result is the same. They all provide us with fish shit! The fish waste provides ammonia and nitrates which later on in the cycle will be converted to plant food. Above the tank is what is called the grow bed. It can be made up of just about anything. A lot of people use some sort of food rated plastic container. This bed used in many ways you can set the plants in their own trays in the water and basically let them float or you can fill the bed with some sort of grow medium. A few examples of grow mediums are Hydroton or coconut husks are both commonly used.
Since this is more of an overview I don't want to go into details  about which is better or worse and what not to use other than don't use soil. The fun thing about aquaponics is that the everything is versatile. You can design it however you want as long as the principle is the same. You decide how your going to get the fish waste to the plants and how you want to get the clean water from the plants back into the tank. You can use a continuous flow and have an overflow that goes back into the tank. You can have a normal drain and have a timer turn the pump from the tank on and off. You might even try to use a siphon pump and use science to create a drain that when the water gets to a certain point it drains automatically.The fun thing about this whole process is that if you have it setup right you will never have to clean the fish tank because the plants are the bio-filter. It is the only type of filter you can use. You can not use any chemicals in this system. If you use pesticides or some sort of chemicals in the water either your plants will die or your fish will die. So with a successful system comes the reasoning by my statement stating that this is the most organic food society is going to get. Thank you for making it this far and I look forward to providing you with all the information you will need to complete your own system.