Le Baromate Aquaponic Aquarium

You will find no plants in the aquariums themselves, and this is intentional, a submerged plant would draw nutrients at the expense of the edible plants in the grow beds. Decorative elements serve as hiding places instead, which crayfish need immediately after moulting, a period during which their shell remains soft and they are otherwise liable to be harassed. The grow beds themselves are filled with clay pebbles, a grow medium that supports the roots and hosts a proportion of the bacteria, and our overview compares the various grow media available for aquaponics.

Rental is available over 12, 24, or 36 months, with a monthly fee that decreases as the commitment length increases. This fee covers the provision of the Baromate, the plants, the fish, their food, water testing, and maintenance visits. Electricity consumption and top-up water remain your responsibility. A one-off installation fee is charged at the start, covering the preliminary site visit, installation, and commissioning. The exact scope is defined in the contract signed with AURA Urbaine, and it is worth reading carefully before comparing two contract lengths, as the monthly difference between 12 and 36 months adds up to hundreds of euros over the life of the contract. The reasoning here is not that of a purchase, where the question is about amortising equipment, but that of a subscription to a living service, where the value lies in having someone come to look after it every two weeks. This also explains why a longer commitment is easier to negotiate than a shorter one, the logistics of installation and removal weigh heavily on the cost of a 12-month contract.

Eleven edible varieties are available, supplied by partner nurseries in Île-de-France, and you put together your troughs from within this range. Herbal teas bring together mint, lemon balm, sage, and verbena. Culinary herbs include basil, coriander, chives, and parsley. Rounding off the selection are strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and mesclun. Our guide to the best plants to grow in aquaponics overlaps considerably with this list, and the strawberry plant has its own comprehensive guide. There is no obligation to mix varieties, and some businesses prefer an entire trough of the same plant so they have a meaningful quantity ready at the right moment.

Every plant has its own harvesting technique, and cutting lemon verbena is nothing like cutting mixed salad leaves. Plant-by-plant instruction sheets are included, and the cocooners are on hand to answer questions during their visits. The more adventurous can take their own cuttings: select a healthy stem of at least 10 cm with three side shoots, cut it at an angle with a clean tool, strip it down to three leaves, and place it to root in an opaque pot filled with water changed every 5 to 7 days, then replant in clay pebbles. It is often this one action that turns a piece of furniture you admire into one you truly own, because the person who has taken a mint cutting comes back to see if it has rooted.

You are leasing a maintained ecosystem. After your order, a team visits your premises to understand how the space is used, choose the right location and finalise the plant list. Around a month later, the technical team installs the Baromate, in a matter of hours and without disrupting the space. After that, every two weeks a cocooner calls to analyse the water, trim the plants, clean the unit, check on the fish and replace anything that needs replacing. Between visits, a call-out can be arranged with a simple phone call, usually within 24 hours.

An aquaponic system does not produce from day one, and that is the key difference from a planted living wall supplied already established. Nitrifying bacteria take three to six weeks to colonise, depending on room temperature, and it is only once that colony is in place that the plants find the nitrogen they need in the water. During this period, the team takes water readings more frequently, the fish load is kept deliberately modest, and the first plants grow slowly. It is better to know this and communicate it to the staff, otherwise the unit may appear to be underperforming at precisely the moment it is doing exactly what it should. Regular harvests generally begin around the second month, and the steady-state rhythm then establishes itself without disruption, with harvesting itself encouraging regrowth in the herbs.

Baromate is installed at SMEs and major accounts alike, including Société Générale, Heineken, the ADP Group, L'Oréal, the Banque de France and Fiducial. A lease is generally treated as an operating expense rather than a capital investment, a point worth confirming with your accountant before putting together the file. For a head office, a coworking space, a school or a local authority, we explain elsewhere why aquaponics makes sense in a shared setting. What these installations have in common has less to do with the sector than with footfall: a unit placed on a daily route gets noticed, picked from and talked about, whereas the same unit tucked away in a closed room simply becomes another piece of furniture.