Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Wowsa. That is impressive. They must have airlocks to prevent contamination. Our little university NMHU has one greenhouse with nothing in it at the moment. It may be if the Rio Gallinas Greenhouse AP project is successful they may use their greenhouse for aquaponics.

Msu greenhouses are pretty old but they do have a lot of space. I think they are trying to work on a grant to start replacing them (I can only hope I have money to try and buy a big one when they do replace them if they offer them to the public... They are all glass so would be a nice addition to my other grow areas.)

I don't know about air locks, but the greenhouses are divided into different grow rooms which give them some control of temp and humidity, just not enough control for what they needed to drop temps on the lavender. My wife said this weekend we can move the lavender to the garage it will be ok to freeze she just didn't want to take it from 80 degrees greenhouses straight to freezing so now they have been in my 40 degree greenhouse we can move them to the garage and let them freeze until she is ready to take them back to work.

Tonight my uncle Mike who helped my dad and I put the beam up and the rafters for the greenhouse came over so I showed him that I still had stuff growing in December... It's a bit colder than I would like, was 39F when I went in so I turned the small buddy heater on again, they left so we went to town for Chinese buffet for dinner and I forgot to turn the heater off, so it ran for about an hour and got it up to 56f in that one hour. I think this weekend I will take one of my fish tank heaters out there and see if heating the water will be enough to warm it up a bit when the sun isn't helping me get solar gain. I don't really want to but I need to get it back to where it's staying about 45f or higher if I want the tomatoes to grow or ripen.

My uncle said he has a small wall mounted propane heater in his workshop that is attached to his garage. He said he just leaves the pilot light lit on it and it is enough to keep the workshop above 45 at night. So my hunt continues for a way of heating the greenhouse. I will go check the temp in the morning and see how much it falls overnight after warming it up tonight. I will have to measure how much electric the fish tank heater uses and see what will be most cost effective.... That or propane ran for an hour every night (if I can find one of the wall mount units that I can leave the pilot running I might go that route too)

I put a 300w heater in my DWC bed, I figured it is the largest body of water in my system that I don't have to worry about the fish knocking it around. Will see how well it helps warm things up. The lowest setting is 65f so I set it there and will hopefully be enough to warm the greenhouse up a bit. I calculated out the amount of electric it will use if it runs 24/7 for a month and it is less than my central air was costing us through the summer so my bill shouldn't go any higher than my summer electric bills.

I measured the fish tank water and it was 5.5C (about 42f) which is about what the air temp is in the greenhouse, so hopefully warming the water up will bring the air temp up a bit too and get me back above the 45 to 50 range. I figure this while being more expensive in the long run should be cheaper in the short term because I don't have to buy anything.

I use a small propane heater with a 30 lbs tank at night. The tank lasts for a week. Night outside temps are in the teens, the heater keeps it at 50f.
No need during daylight, it gets up to 120, outside 30s and 40s.
I still have potatoes, onions and Strawberries going.

Little..... 15k BTU little, or bigger?

Adam

Good morning. I just checked our greenhouse at 5:20 AM and it is 56F near the bottom and 50F up at the channel panel roof. It's ~20F outside. It really helps to have the greenhouse attached to the house with a good fire going in the wood stove. Currently we have only one of the French doors to the GH open.
I wonder if you added a carbon monoxide detector in the greenhouse you could monitor the oxygen levels?

I use this one

http://www.mrheater.com/18-000-btu-cabinet-heater.html

This is the one I am considering buying https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Heater-Corpor ... _3?ie=UTF8

It has a built in thermostat so you can set it on low and when the greenhouse reaches that temp it will kick off to just the pilot light to save propane. A guy on another forum pointed me towards this one. He has a fairly large green house that he uses two of these in to keep it 50f I think with a single layer of plastic. I'm trying to find out how long a tank of propane lasts him so I can try to estimate my cost but he hasn't been on the forum in a while.

I just have the small buddy heater that mounts right on the tank. I want something with a thermostat to regulate itself down to the pilot when not needed. There are cheaper versions of the one in the link but they don't have the thermostat.

I considered that one, but at 7500 feet it will not work, low oxygen shut down

I'll consider myself fortunate then... I'm someplace between 869 and 909 feet according to the two towns on either side of my property. The low oxygen sensor is a great feature for us lowlanders. We use a buddy heater to heat our cabin in TN now that they have the low oxygen sensor so you don't suffocate yourself in the middle of the night.

For now I'm not doing anything with the heat. I will run my small heater if I have time and see it is too cold in there but I'm going to try and let the fish tank heaters warm it up in there before I invest in another heat source. I might have to stick a second heater in to help warm it up a bit. In the past few days it has gone from 5.5C(41F) to about 9.5C (49F)in the fish tank. It is a lot of water to heat up with such a small heater so it's slow going. If I could get it to where the water was warm enough that it warmed the air temp to 49-50F I'd be thrilled and just stick with the aquarium heater. It might be a slow process but that also means it should be fairly stable when it gets to the temp. I figure there is 500-600 gallons of water in the system plus 500+ gallons of water in storage barrels that I'm slowly heating up. My air temp was about 44F last night so it has gone up some (although it was a little sunny yesterday, melted most of our snow because it got above freezing and actually rained for a while...now everything looks pretty disgusting so I'm OK if it wants to snow again this week but probably won't happen).

A week from today I will be driving to my property in Tennessee, so I don't want to spend any more money than I have to between now and then. Once I get back home after the first of the year I'll assess my finances and decide if I really want to buy a heater or not.

I am thoroughly enjoying (NOT!) the joys of dealing with insurance companies this week. Monday morning I finished eating breakfast when all of the sudden I noticed that part of my second molar was gone (either swallowed it with breakfast or while I slept). Fortunately the nerve isn't exposed or anything so it doesn't hurt, but I want to get it fixed before it gets worse and does start to hurt. I don't have a normal dentist, and had not attempted to go to a dentist since switching to my wife's insurance this year. I'm finding her insurance really sucks because no one in my area accepts it. It works fine for her because she goes to a dentist in East Lansing that she has been going to since she started grad school at MSU, but for me I don't want to have to drive that far to go to the dentist. Her insurance is through Aetna which there is one new dentist where I used to go which accepts Aetna, but hers is a DMO which requires you to call Aetna and pick a dentist out of their list of approved dentists as a way to try and keep the costs down, and this practice in town doesn't do the DMO part of Aetna. So I am going to have to drive to Lansing or Jackson to go to the dentist. I started calling around and her dentist cannot get me in until January 5th. So I called all of the other places in Lansing that accept Aetna DMO and some of them are accepting new patients but then when you tell them its the DMO they aren't accepting new DMO patients they only allow so many DMO's. Others were even later in January before I could get in. I did finally find one who told me it would be late January but said they do have walk in emergencies available at any time, so now I just have to decide if I want to go in as a walk in emergency (which I assume will cost me more) or wait until January 5th. I did ask my local dentist what it would cost for a crown with no insurance and they said about $1000... I'm going to end up paying $325 with her insurance. Now I just wish this had happened two months ago so I would have known to jump back on my own dental insurance during open enrollment (my wife has other insurance offered to her as well, just has stayed with what she has had because she didn't know it was going to be a problem to go someplace locally... since she works in East Lansing its not a big deal for her to go to the dentist there.). At least then I should be able to get in to a local dentist. This is the reason I have not been to the dentist in many years... dealing with insurance sucks!


Last night checking the greenhouse temps the greenhouse had creeped up to about 50 degrees. It was fairly warm and sunny yesterday helped a lot. My fish tank water temp is running about 52, DWC bed was a degree or two warmer. It will be interesting to see if once it warms up if it will keep the greenhouse warmer or if the heater will still have to run constantly to maintain it. The snow has pretty much all melted now, only a couple of spots left with any in it. Makes everything look terrible... can see all of the tire tracks in the yard now... should have mowed the grass one last time before winter.

I did notice that it seems like the plants in the DWC are a lot happier now that I have the heater in the DWC tank. Seems like they are filling in better and looking greener. Will post a couple pics from my phone in a minute.

Some pics. Mostly greens, strawberry plant still alive but not producing flowers. Tomato plants limping along. Still lots of jalapenos (not pictured) and bell peppers.

Merry belated Christmas everyone. We had a pretty good morning opening presents with my little one... Got bad news around lunch time that my grandfather had passed away. He was 90 years old.

Up early this morning, was supposed to be headed to TN for the rest of the week today but now I'm waiting to hear more details and see if I can help with anything to get ready for grandpa's funeral. I might still head down and back just a day down and a day back because I planned to haul my dad's tractor back up here for storage so it doesn't get stolen again.

Went out to check on the greenhouse since I've been gone a couple days. It's 2F outdoors, about 37F in the greenhouse..
Just not getting enough sun. Have the propane heater running in there for a few, going to put a second fish tank heater in to try and help a bit more.

My condolences. That's rough. 90 though, that's pretty darn good.

I ended up driving to TN on Wednesday because my uncle didn't think the funeral would be before Tuesday, I got to Kentucky and found out they were pushing for funeral before the weekend because my older sister drove up from New Mexico, my younger sister drove up from Louisiana and my cousin drove up from Tennessee and all had to go back by Sunday. So I had to make it a down and back trip to TN to pick up the tractor and come right back home. Well I got about an hour from the property and had a wheel bearing go out on my truck. I was able to limp to the property then have my dad drive me to town to get parts, so all I got to do while at the property was change my wheel hub, sleep, then get up and head back to Michigan. I made it back home Thursday night, missed the first visitation for the funeral but was home in time for visitation Friday then the funeral. I had the honor of being a pallbearer to carry my grandfather to his final resting place. They had a short service at the gravesite because the weather was so cold, but he did receive military honors that they played taps and folded the flag that had adorned his casket, and presented it to my uncle Mike who turned and presented it to my cousin Sarah because she has been in the National Guard for 18 years and Mike didn't serve, so he felt it more appropriate that Sarah receive grandpa's flag (and fitting, Sarah had given grandpa a flag that had flown over Fallujah while she was stationed there, that my grandpa had hung in his living room, so she got that flag back too). Grandpa was part of the Army Air Force towards the end of WWII. He served for about the last 1.5 years before the war was over. Once he was out of the Army he went to work at Oldsmobile as a tool and die maker, worked at Oldsmobile for 30 years before retiring all while farming and raising a family of six kids. He retired from Oldsmobile and farming at about the same time and leased his farm as a crop share for the past 35+ years. Many of my grandpa's family made it at least to mid 80s or early 90s before they passed. My grandma died 17 years ago so we have been fortunate to have him for so long after grandma passed, but it was time for them to get back together, he had been waiting to see her again for 17 years.

It was nice to see the whole family together, we took some family pictures after the funeral at the local masonic temple that we used to have family events at all the time so we took a photo on the stairs where we used to always take photos, I think there are about 17 grandkids, and now closer to 30 great grandkids so it was nice to get pictures how we used to growing up. After that we went back to the farm to visit and tell stories with just the family because it's been years since we had a big family event at the farm... After grandma died 17 years ago grandpa couldn't deal with the chaos of having everyone there.