Wow, this forum is amazing!
So I've been interested in AP ever since I put in a dirt garden for my parents last summer. Been reading and learning as much as I can even though I'm currently in a small downtown apartment in Denver, CO. But already looking at both a system for here (nice big south facing window) as well as either for my parents or eventually if I buy some land out in the hills.
Over the last few days, I got bored and was curious what a system like this would cost, so being a typical engineer / LCA guy, I decided to sketch out a system that would be easy to put together, easy to maintain, and 'relatively' cheap to do.
And then things went awry, and I REALLY started sketching things out and doing a full cost analysis on it - it's been a slow few days.
so this is what I ended up sketching out... it's still missing the sump pump and the line to the fish tank, but that's easy enough to imagine (or add later):
Costing it out was a little surprising though. I'm sure it could be done cheaper, but again, I was going after easy to build / easy to maintain.
And it's a big system. The tank is 500 gallons (~2000L) and each bed is 4ftx16ft (two standard pieces of plywood as the base, and 2x12's as the sides. The upper bed would be a drain / ebb media bed, whereas the lower 'sump' bed would be a continuous flow with floating foam. While made of wood, I'd use a food safe polyester resin to seal the beds and keep them water tight.
The basic system relies on a single sump pump (http://www.mcmaster.com/#sump-pumps/=lnlxzy) that draws about 500 watts (yeah, it's a big pump, but relatively efficient, and easily capable of turning the tank over at least 1x per hour (if not more). Ideally it'll be slowed a bit by using a constriction and venturi to aerate the fish tank. depending on electricity cost, I'm estimating about $275 per year to run the pump.
Costing everything else out, the project comes to about $1800. Seems a little high, but assuming I can get 40 lb of fish and 640 lbs of veggies, I'd be offsetting about $2000 worth of food per year (caveat 1: that's based off of about 1/2 of market price for regular fish & veggies, and caveat 2: I don't think I can eat all of that, but I'm sure it could be sold or traded to others)
Just curious if anyone has anything like this right now, and if so, how my estimates compare.
Thanks for the great information.