Ready-to-use aquaponics kit for garden or terrace

The two systems serve different plants, which is why they coexist. The square metre of floating rafts suits fast-growing, lightweight crops, lettuces, mesclun, soft herbs, where roots hang directly in the water. The two square metres of grow medium beds support plants that grow tall and bear fruit, such as tomatoes, peppers, and strawberries, because clay pebbles provide a mechanical anchor that water alone cannot offer. You allocate your crops according to their growth habit rather than the season: a lettuce on a raft and a tomato in a bed coexist perfectly well, as they draw from the same water. Our article on choosing a grow medium in aquaponics covers this difference in detail. The grow medium beds also serve a second purpose: their clay pebbles house a proportion of the bacterial colony, supplementing the biofilter, which is why they are never emptied completely between crops.

Power consumption is 592 kWh per year, including pumps, oxygenation, and filtration, running continuously because the bacteria never stop. Maintenance, on the other hand, takes around 30 minutes a month: no watering, no weeding, no digging. What remains is feeding the fish, topping up the water to compensate for evaporation, and monitoring the parameters. It is this last point that determines your first season far more than the time you put in, and the 592 kWh quoted is an annual average, cooling draws more in summer and less for the rest of the year. Make sure you have a reliable, protected power supply: a prolonged outage stops circulation, oxygenation, and cooling all at once.

With a conventional vegetable patch, you water and fertilise; here you feed fish, and everything else follows from that. This shift has a consequence you notice from the second season onwards: your focus becomes the water rather than the soil. A pH drifting outside its range, an ammonium level reappearing after an over-generous feeding, a water temperature climbing in August: these are the three things you monitor, and they can be read in a few minutes with a liquid drop test. In return, you no longer dig, no longer weed, and no longer buy fertiliser. The water circulates rather than being discarded, and only evaporation needs topping up, bringing annual consumption to a fraction of that of a vegetable patch of the same size.

Assembly and disassembly require no tools, which is unusual for something of this size and makes two things possible: you can move it over the years, and you can replace a single part without dismantling everything else, something that matters on equipment built to last several decades. Installation and commissioning are included throughout France, and the system is manufactured near Nantes using French materials. Its design is modular: you start with the base configuration and add growing or fish-keeping capacity later, without starting from scratch. This modularity explains the stated height range, from 1.20 m in the basic configuration to 3 m once the modules are stacked. An extension is something you decide after a first season, once you know what you are actually harvesting and how much time you have to manage it.

Once the bench is set up and filled, there is a waiting period: the bacterial colony takes several weeks to establish itself in the biofilter, and it is the ammonium and nitrite readings that tell you when the fish load can begin to grow. The sequence is always the same, first an ammonium spike, then a nitrite spike, then both dropping back to zero as nitrates appear. Allow 4 to 6 weeks, with a reading every 2 days during that period, then weekly readings thereafter. Record the values rather than simply reading them: a series of measurements shows the progress of the cycle where a single isolated reading tells you nothing, and it is that series which confirms that the first fish can be introduced. Our guide to getting started with an aquaponic system describes these readings step by step.

A cubic metre exposed to sunlight heats up quickly, and this is the hardest parameter to manage in an above-ground system, where a sunken pond benefits from the thermal inertia of the soil. The built-in cooling addresses this, and it works all the less hard when you help it along by positioning the bench to avoid the full afternoon sun. Warm water holds less dissolved oxygen at precisely the moment when the fish need it most, so temperature deserves the same attention as pH during the warmer months. Top-up water consumption also increases in summer, as evaporation is greater from an exposed open surface. Top up with water that has had its chlorine allowed to off-gas, or passed through a carbon filter, a direct chlorinated addition will affect the bacterial colony in the biofilter before it causes any harm to the fish.