Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

not a bad idea

Good point Gnash. Will see how I go. Would still be costly with the price of steel these days. Could buy heaps of AP stuff for that cost.

I'm with the 'timber is weak croud', particularly mick, the 2" by 4" (is this 50 x 90?) is very slim for the job. Joist usual span 1.2m at 450mm spacing for house flooring, have I read wrong or to they hold 7m span?

gnash, good point in centralising the supports for the purpose

No only about 3m. THe 7 meters is the length of the H bar.

k, sorry, bit slow.

Still at 3 meters the timber would be well and truly loaded. It would need some larger timber on top (greater than 19mm flooring at least) to distribute the weight, and still?

Better yet some 75x90-100 bearers between the 50x90 at the point of the fish tank or some L - section steel seated under the joists would definitely cover it. The steel would cope IMO. I'd stand under it as well! (with big mick there I would never be at risk )


Sam
BHP customer Rep.

have heard what may be urban legends of fish mad people installing 1KL tanks in appartments and having them go through floors

Humm ... is this where Joels "10 fat bastards" technique gets utilised

sounds like the right yard stick for the job!

LOL

Hey AM. I can't say I am an experienced Structual enginerer. But i did take 2 years of structual engineering and statics (not to be confused with statistics) Your I beam is good and solid and could hold a good amount of weight no problem.
Some Questions

How many liters of water would you think of putting up there?

What is the distance from one "I" beam to the other?

How thick is the concrete pad?

Are there footings?

Are those really 2x4's? (they would need to be swapped)

On a side note my dad has a few set ups like this using old scafolding. Two of them are set up over his and my mom's cars (1957 Chevy Nomad and 1965 Mustang). And have a fair amount of weight on them with no priblems. We used another one to stack snowmobiles. We set it up with just two horizontal supports and 2x4's and it held well over 1700lbs 772kg for the whole summer.

Let me do some digging to find some calcs off the net to see what you would need to do. (All my books are still in canada doh!)

Im no expert(far from it), but i do know that the weight would be best above the strongest points, and evenly distributed above the supports

now i dont know how much water you wanted up there but the "tank" i am thinking of would hold around 1400L.....(based on your shed being 6m by 4m which it is probably larger judging by the pics)

This may be a stupupid idea but....
how about making a tank out of 300mm pvc which runs around the edge of the shed, directly above all the main vertical supports. This way the weight is distributed above all the suports, it is abit more discrete, and you wont ever be standing directly below 500L of water...

the problems i see is, not being able to get 300mm right angles...so you would need to prob cut the pvc at a 45 deg angle and then plastic weld it to the other 45 deg angle

if you wanted to store less water, smaller dia pvc...(but if you even think about it i would check the calculations incase i added or missed off a zero )

Anyone see any other problems with this?
May cost abit.....
tank would be very hard to clean..

To carry Daniels idea a bit further ... to surround your mezzanine on 4 sides with 300 mm poly would take app. 20 M , giving close to 1400 litres capacity . he's obviously already worked this out, anyway.

We use 250 and 300 poly extensively in our piggery growing sheds, for an under-floor poo flushing system, and I am in the process of hunting up prices and source for 300 poly, 90 deg bends and tees right now.

This stuff all goes together with the regular 'blue glue', but we do get away with using aquarium-type sealer on temporary/test setups so we can reclaim the components.

This pipe has a wall thickness of about 8mm so it's not really feasible to cut it lengthwise for growbeds as the framework to support it would add considerably to the cost. Then again, we do set halved lengths of it concrete as floor level feed troughs, so maybe 80% buried in compacted earth might work as growbeds (thinking aloud, humm-dee-humm-dee-humm.) :sign7:

I'll get back as soon as our supplier gives me some feedback.

LOVE the lateral thought!

Hmmm, bit pricey !! Best I can get for a bulk buy is app $200 / 6M length, add 50 % for small sales, OK for piggery application, but in reality we're looking at maybe $1500 or more to build a 1400L water storage when you include the 90 deg. fittings, tees &c. Not practical IMO, unless some useable pipe turns up at a salvage yard. I'll keep it in mind for growbeds, though.

Definatley not a stupupid idea!
Is there anything else that could be used thats a bit cheeper? Something like a box gutter?