Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I tried a search, but my search skills must be lacking.

I am planning on using trout in my system. I live in Colorado on the eastern plains. I am planning on putting the fish tank in my barn to keep it out of the sunlight in the greenhouse I will be building, which will be attached to the barn.

How do I keep the water cool enough in the summer to keep the trout happy?

Thanks Online,
I appreciate the help.
Myke

You can use a water chiller, such as I use on my larger system. We are barely into spring, but i had to run it for a while yesterday, and will again for the next few days, with hot weather forecast, up to 37C on Monday.

Hey Gunna what is your chillers capacity? I was at a crayfish storage facility this week and they’re doing an upgrade and there were a heap of oldish chiller units out the front and I was thinking.....

Lol Skeggley. Nothing like seeing something that tempts you to do an upgrade.

I reckon Gunagullas chiller was a 2 HP, he has a fair bit of water volume.

Yea, 2HP rating. In use it draws 2-3kW, depending on air temp, lower being better!

The COP varies quite a bit with air temp, so I can get better than 6kW of cooling capacity on cool mornings, but it's more like 4kW during the day. I need about 15kWh of cooling to reduce the water temp by 1C, if there is no net heating from the sun etc.

Ok, cool, thanks guys. If I get back to site I’ll ask and if I can get one for the right price, like nothing, I’ll do it and keep it stored until I eat the 60 odd 300mm+ sp’s currently in the tank and do trout again. I have carried trout through 2 seasons before using evaporative cooling however it was stressful while at work on hot days...

I use vertical pipes and media beds. The vertical pipes are 2 m long. The water falling down these pipes cool down. A friend in the same zone as me only have grow beds and our water temperature differ with about 6 degrees Celsius.

Maybe this is an option ?

I do have a problem in winter when my water temperature hovered around 8 degrees Celsius. I added some black pipes (25 mm x 50 m) which I pumped the water through during the day and switched of at night to warm up the water that helped.

When the air is really hot it will also warm the water up, to beyond the safe temperature for trout.