Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi RupertofOZ

The lateral perlin support is barley visable protruding at front top, corner angle braces were not installed at time of photo.

Loy

Ahh.. so I'm only partially blind and stupid.

Thanks Hoopman

Hoopman - tell us more about your plans with AP. I am also interested to hear how you learnt about it and who the other Texans are that you were talking about that have said good things about the site.

AP certainly has some good synergies with your your greenhouse interests :-)

Hi All..

At present our plans are very simple, preformed in baby steps, Construct the 20x48 hoop frame, installing a small 1000 gallon system for hands on trials, producing small crops of lettuce. We had been reveiwing Aquaponics for some time when I came across an old issue of PH&G
http://www.hydroponics.com.au/back_issues/issue50.html . Quite a sucess story right here in Texas, so I'm thinking, why not? It's an interesting new challenge that can benefit so many. We will use system info from your site combined with the experience of others. Being well known in our local area for greenhouses, several public education officals and teachers had been urging me to assist them in exploring the aspect of setting up a trial house in hopes of entending it into the schools program.

Your site was referred to me by one of my clients in Mcallen Texas after he purchased a bending tool for building his aquaponics house.

I'll post more on this later..

cool, it's great to get aquaponics into schools, and infect the children while they're young and vulnerable

You know Jayme, the main thing is that here in the US, just like Australia and most other parts of the world, farmers are looking at a variety of different methods and crops that they can grow. AP can give many of them an income source that is year round, and will help reduce our depedence upon foreign produce during the off seasons, while also decreasing our demands upon wild fish stocks. The public schools in the US quite often provides the basic instruction to most of our future farmers, while the college/university level gives instruction to those interested in teaching, research or other ag related professions.

This is an interesting thread. I'm wondering if it ever resulted in anyone on BYAP (in Aust) importing/using one of hoopman's benders. The reason I'm so keen to find someone in Aust is, from what I can find out so far, we don't have the very light grade (<1.5mm) pre-swaged "top rail" sections available here, so we'd need to use a close alternative.
I've been looking into various options for obtaining the hoops for my planned greenhouse. I can find the gal pipe at a good price but so far quotes to roll and swage are prohibitive. Anyone know anyone (in Aust) who has used a hand bender to make their hoops?
Thanks all.

Look here for an alternative and cheap way of bending pipes for a hoop house, Tallman. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Domani-A ... 0393681321

I found that I couldn't buy the steel cheap enough to make it worth while. Was cheaper to buy a second hand greenhouse.