Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello,
I am from the Spokane area, I tried HP last year as a trial run in a small area of 7' x 10' area, and was amazed at the results. I did want to do AP but I was in a trial run mode to see if I could even raise plants-viola success!! So now I think I am ready and willing to try AP and starting construction of a 12' x 40' site. Since my space is so big for now I feel that I have a lot options at hand to do AP. My concern is keeping the water warm enough for the fish during the sever winter times that we have here. Its a great venture and anxious to learn and to grow more veggies, definitely tired of pulling weeds and long hard hours of rototilling of 3600 square feet. I do have a 1600 square foot berry patch and 16 varities-36 plants of hops that I grow each year for my beer making. Any suggestions for AP on keeping fish alive during the winter months is greatly appreciated-thank you!

Sounds like a fantastic area to get stuck into.

I can't help with the heating, I'm sure others are better at that then me. It doesn't get cold enough to worry here.

Throw up some pictures, I'm curious to see your existing HP systems. If you need a hand with pictures, let me know.

Hi Gands,

Where I am I have never needed to heat my water (in fact cooling it would be more likely) so I have no experience in this area. Although I have read a few threads about it and the main point I have gotten from my reading is that you need to heat the entire greenhouse and that trying to heat just the water is futile as the water loses temperature too quickly even if you insulate your FT and sumps etc as the water will never be totally covered. So I imagine that having a greenhouse that is well insulated is the most important part and that there is not excessive greenhouse space that is not used as you will waste energy heating it unless you can use passive forms of heating.
Sorry I can't help much more than that..

Where in the Spokane area are you? My sister and her family live in Post Falls - so I know the area and weather. Have you considered a buried greenhouse? A walipini style (http://www.bensoninstitute.org/Publication/Manuals/Walipini.pdf) greenhouse is very effective at collecting light, and conserving heat.

I live out in the Nine Mile area, I have thought of a semi-buried structure but at the time it takes too much $$ and I don't have that to spend right now. I'll have to do some more pondering on this.

smatthew thank you for the input of http://www.bensoninstitute.org/Publicat ... lipini.pdf, this gives me some hope. I have plenty of area to do this in, just need to find the $$$ to do the digging, thanks again!!

Check out the Bright Agrotech videos on YouTube. They are in Laramie, WY and I'm pretty sure I remember seeing some stuff about how they heat their greenhouse and fish house.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BrightAgrotechLLC

I live in Spokane as well. I had the same questions about the heating so over the last 8mo I ended up building a "passive solar greenhouse" like

http://aes.missouri.edu/bradford/educat ... nhouse.php

Then I built one of these to heat the water

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWZ3qQ3R8_A

My setup is 2 X 450g tanks. One is for the fish the other is a sump. I have about 100sqft of grow bed and another 40sqft of float bed.

Air temp has not dropped below 60 since early Feb! That is with temps in the 20s at times. Water temp has remained in the 70s. At this rate I don't think I will need to heat the greenhouse in the winter.

Good Luck!

What kind of fish are you using? Have you heard of anyone using trout in this area???

I thought about using trout but I went with Blue tilapia instead. I'm sure you could do rainbows though.