🦐 Apartment Aquaponics Update | Erin Murphy

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Jun 30, 2026<br>&bull;18 min read

🦐 Apartment Aquaponics Update

About two years ago, my awesome boyfriend John and I set out to create an aquaponics system in our one-bedroom NYC apartment. Since my first post was more of a chronological journal about the build (and we’ve learned A LOT since then), I hope this one will serve as a practical guide for replicating our setup and avoiding our mistakes!

Aquaponics 101

Aquaponics combines aquaculture (breeding, rearing, and harvesting water organisms) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil). Frequently, this is done in large-scale industrial farms where both the plants and animals are raised for food, though there are many thriving online communities of home aquaponics enthusiasts.

There are many different kinds of aquaponics systems, but (to the best of my knowledge) they all share the same cycle: fish waste water provides nutrients to plants, which in turn filter the water. Despite the abundance of online resources, when John and I first became interested in setting up a home system, we noticed most examples still used tanks and grow-beds that would be far too large for our NYC apartment. This has motivated us to share our experiences, and we hope that this guide may be useful to others looking to create a similar setup!

This guide consists of the following sections:

Our System: a high-level overview of our current system design

Recent Improvements: highlights of what we have recently changed compared to our initial build

Lessons Learned: mistakes we learned the hard way

Step-by-Step Build Guide: if you too want to be a city aquaponics farmer!

Our System

Media-Based Continuous Flow

We opted for a media-based aquaponics system, which means our plants are housed in a separate grow-bed filled with clay gravel. Water from the tank<br>is pumped through the clay substrate, where the rooted plants filter out nutrients from the fish waste. Additionally, we opted for a continuous-flow system,<br>which means that water is continuously cycled from the tank through the bottom few inches of the media bed before draining out the opposite side of the<br>bed. This is an alternative to a flood & drain system, where a timed pump periodically fills the media bed with water before letting it drain completely.<br>While continuous-flow systems are somewhat limited to edible plants that don’t mind a continuous stream of water past their roots, they also provide a much more<br>stable water and nutrient level for the fish living in the tank.

Fig 1: A final sketch of the design where water is pumped into the clay substrate on the right, and then flows back into the tank on<br>the left.

Vertical Design

We decided to build a vertical system, where the grow-bed of edible plants was placed above the aquatic tank in order to:

Conserve the amount of space the system took up in our apartment.

Reduce the odds of any potential leaks, as any water that leaks from the grow-bed will fall into the tank below. Similarly, we added a second storage tub on the bottom shelf to catch any potential water overflow from the tank.

Minimize energy costs, as the water only needs to be pumped a short distance up into the grow-bed, and will then be gravity-fed back into the tank.

We decided to use an industrial metal shelving rack as the foundation of our system; a practical and stable option that can support both the heavy tank and grow-bed. The rack is about 3ft wide and fits inside a spare closet space in our new apartment (a true NYC luxury).

Fig 2: The full system on the shelving rack in our closet.

Small Size

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.<br>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.<br>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<br>to this size to minimize the flooding risk. The tradeoff of this apartment-scale system is that we can only support a grow-bed of about 3 square feet,<br>and are limited to crops with smaller root systems that don’t require a lot of nutrients (such as leafy greens and herbs).

Grow-Bed

Our grow-bed consists of clay pebbles and a drainage tube. We recently added a bag of crushed coral as an additional filter within the drainage tube. This helps catch waste, soften any drainage sounds, and adds extra minerals to the water that our shrimp and snails need for healthy molting and shells, respectively. Currently, we are growing basil, and we just added two ‘Tiny Tim’ dwarf tomato seedlings as an experiment to see if we can support fruiting plants. We’ve previously had success with growing basil, mint, and lettuce plants.

Tank & Aquatic Friends

Our tank is currently home to MANY...