Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Main thread in Green Roofs Australia

http://greenroofs.wordpress.com/2008/07/17/green-roofs-for-aquaponics-investment-background-lectures-from-august-1-7/

Concepts...






http://greenroofs.wordpress.com/

http://www.fytogreen.com.au/products/ro ... index.html

http://www.elmich.com.au/greenroofsystems/about.php

Some inspiration.
http://greenroofs.wordpress.com/contact-us/









^^ This is a roof full of succulents on a court house..

Advanatages.
superior thermal management of building.
Heat is blocked by transpiration of plants.
Stable materials with air gaps provide buffering from cold. If you used a plywood backing on a timber frame (trusses if need be) you could also place 3 inches of foam in between creating a superior insulated roof that has life and provides habitat or food. You could grow wheat, rice and other grains with beans, greens and other low root penetration species on your roof space.

It is low maintenance once established with weeding requiring 2 days a year, not such a chore in your own meadow.

Its not as heavy as ceramic tile and its more durable in severe weather. Roots will hold the roof together and hail as big as you like will not penetrate the spongy medium.

Combine this with green living walls and solar hydronic sub floor heating, wall insulation, double glazed windows, cool earth pipes for cooling and you will be living in a house of low or no cost heating and cooling.

For Australia almost all native coastal heath species, grasses and succulents will perform brilliantly here.

yes !
this is what I want to put on top of my sea-container studio idea,
thats one BIG growbed

Nowhere does the system blurb mention anything about "water proofing" the flat roof!
In 40 years of construction experience, I have yet to see a flat roof system that doesn't leak (either initialy from bad product/installation/application or subsequently from thermal expansion/contraction and lap/sealant failure) and fail the basic water proofing function of a roof!
Domestically, this system is definitely not viable for installation. No Right minded Certifier in Oz would approve it, and even if they did and a leak did occur, how do you find it under all that "topping"? And flat roofs in snow prone countries? Give me a break!
Commercially it may be affordable to be built with a cavity roof structure that would preclude any leak maintenance but at what capital cost?

Looks good, but not really practically viable. Have another look at the installations in two or three years down the track . . . just like the trendy planter boxes etc, designed and built for every block of units or offices . . . no-one looks after them and they become an eyesore or abandoned because they leak!

Cheers IanK

Perhaps that's a poor diagram but there are plenty of green roofs around the world that have been working successfully for many years Ian. Once you start looking into it, green roofs have been around for centuries in some of the coldest and wetest environments, and work very successfully.

Can you do this on an existing roof with a 10 degree pitch which has tray tin on it?
What would the wieght factor be as the existing roof is not meant to hold great weights I imagine.
It would be wonderful as this section of our roof is quite large and creates lots of reflected heat into upperstorey windows. I have often thought of a roof garden but don't know where to begin.
Ian are you talking about new rooves with this application built in from new? Not retrofitting?

Only thing for me is the plants would have to be possum proof as the buggers eat anything they can get hold of.
Dale

Any pitch can be done though it gets to a point where maintaining is hard.
The weight is around 6kg m^2 for 50mm grow media
Roof tile is the same.

The weight can increase with thickness of soils/ media type and grow media.
1 liter of water - 1kg.




As stated above, green roofs were traditional in Europe and in some places still are. The roof should never be "flat". Drainage cells provide 2 inches of space for water / air to move in. You can use more than one layer to seal the roof as I am planning.

Plywood _ 2mm plastic seal welded (heat - works for irrigation channels). 50mm styrofoam panels again welded (chemically). Another player of pond rubber 8mm rubber again heat welded, Square box spacer is a floating plastic smooth base with open cells for breathing - water flow. The above is a cup cake panel. The Square box is an open ribbed frame that does not hold any water at all.
Above the base goes geo textile, a root and flocculate *fine crap barrier that goes under rail lines, roads and drainage lines to prevent mud holes and dirt seep.

Above the geo textile 15mm is the grow medium which is a big hairy sponge. 50 - 150mm.

That kind of roof, with 3 very flexible seals will never leak in your lifetime. Better than bitumen and metal shingle..

I like to watch Grand Designs on telly. A lot of the houses they build have sedum roofs. I wonder how they go over time?
Dale

If a roof it's sturdy enough to support actually planting a layer directly on the roof, there is the option of training vines to shade the roof section. (of course you have to be careful with vines because some become monsters that could tear down the house themselves if you let them.)

the Elmich site says their systems use 30mm deep growing media/layering, wonder how it stacks up in price to just loading the roof up with hydroton & having a f&d growbed roof

that was my plan, but using a cut-down sea container lined with pond liner

should be strong enough, how much does waterlogged hydroton weigh ? ...

Rockwool is 50% holding capacity by volume.

so 1m^2 by 30mm = 30 liters - 0.5% = 15 liters = 15kg max.

Add the wet weight of plants and you will get around 45kg max when in storm and saturated.

Roof tiles (1940's red terracotta ceramic) weigh 50+kg when wet m^2

The vines sound like quite a simple and easier idea. A lattice can be put up on the roof, lets say 6 feet high so you can walk under it, with something like bamboo, and some form of vines or money plant be trained to grow on it. It would grow well even if it were fed only water and I assume that if were water from an AP system they would just go mad. If the purpose is to the give the roof an additional cover of foliage why put in all that dirt/grow media when you can just do it with vines?

I've been dreaming of a vine system to cover the entire house, walls and roof, would look really good and would provide much needed insulation. A good point was raised about vines being strong enough to tear down houses, perhaps if a light lattice were used to train them so that they were growing on that rather that on/in the walls themselves...?

Guy bought a house and one day decided to cut back the vines in the backyard. There he found a one bedroom flat under the vines. Used to be a nurses quarters for an old hospital.

Things to keep in mind with vines or any plants right up against a building.

1-roots, make sure the roots are not going to invade foundations or plumbing. Roots can really do in a foundation if it's a vigorous tree/vine growing right up against them. And if you go planting certain types of plats where the roots can seek the plumbing it can be a real pain to deal with them regularly.

2-some vines can happily pick apart masonry or other materials as they cling and even send rootlets into the structure. (Nature can really take over if you let it.)

3-moisture. This might be a moot point in some climates but in others a heavy vine cover on a wall can really cause a mold and mildew problem.

If you can train the vines on a trellis a bit away from the walls and roof so that you can get behind them for maintenance, it would probably be far better than letting the vines directly at the structure. Plus it can give you a shady place to be under/behind the vines.

Abdul Have you read Outbackozzie's Kalgoorlie System thread?
http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=83434#p83434
Some where (probably fairly far along in it though) he puts up a wire cover over the system that vines can grow on.
Of course there is also the fence panel structure I used to have over my system (till the county made me take it down) that vines could climb on and I could also use it to support shade cloth or greenhouse film over the system.
Of course anything you put up would probably be regulated by some government something or other if your area has that sort of thing to deal with (and I figure most do since some one always wants to collect a fee.)

On another note. I'm trying to figure out how one might use Nate's towers for a green roof design. It wouldn't be solid since one would need to access for planting/harvesting but it might not be too hard to sort out. Lay the towers over at an angle so they are more of a modified NFT sort of set up and run gutters at the base of them to collect the flow and return it to the tanks.

EB:
Yeah Joel, I was just going off at their installation diagram which didn't show any Waterproofing or Tanking, which is an additional (and quite high!) cost. Flat roofs to me, are anything that only has drainage falls of 1:100 to 1:50 to various outlets. Normally Flexible Membrane / Epoxy/FG or the like, lap sealed and covered with hold gravel or the like. These are normally for Commercial/High rise/Large footprint buildings which cannot practically have pitched roofs.
I have designed Earth covered houses which have also proved quite sucessful but only because of the detailing in flashing and water-proofing. Our own Government House in Canberra is earth covered! (and they do have a few problems with leaks!) So, I am aware of the advantages of earth covering/Green roof etc. I helped write the manuscript for Geoff Middleton's book on Pise and Adobe construction (now out of print, but it is called "Build your house of Earth" published 1967 if you can get your hands on it.) and have had a great deal of experience in Berm Housing (i.e. Earth banked up against walls to eaves height or window sill height) These walls also need a high level of tanking for waterproofing, not just becuase of water ingress, but the prevention of hydrostatic pressure build-up which is the main cause of collapsing walls, especially in-expertly designed and built retaining walls!! I'm sure you will agree.

Dale:
Both! I think you can gleen from the above where I'm coming from. It can be done.
Some swiss farm cottage roofs are Grassed and they are at a roof slope of 35 degrees to shed snow!! But in general I don't beleive that normal domestic construction can either structurally support or be waterproof enough to have a "Green Roof"

Cheers IanK