Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

i reccon OBO is right a greenhouse will help

Well, building the greenhouse frame was a very interesting experience. I was kind of designing it on the fly. Had the basic in my head - attach to the neighbours pergola and build from there, but I had no idea about how structurally sound it would be, whether I'd get the bend I wanted etc etc.

So it took me all day, but end product is pretty good:



Attached to the neighbours pergola using 20mm pressure pipe saddles. The nail just stops it sliding through:


And finally, I did some stuff I'd been meaning to do for ages - put a no-return valve on the pump, replaced the bubblewrap cover with seethrough plastic (recycled from my first greenhouse attempt).

My cousin owns a canvasing business here in the ACT, so I'm planning on using his industrial sewing machines to sew "pockets" into the greenhouse fabric and then feed the pipe through them. Haven't quite decided how I'm going to do the ends yet. Was thinking that I kind of need them to be removeable so I can just take them right off come summer. So I might make another frame that just "clips" in. Does it matter if there are gaps in the greenhouse?

Certainly in a good spot that is covered from the damaging elements Gemmell - gaps shouldn't be a problem

Water temps a barmy 6 degrees this morning, with a forecast top of 15!!! I really hope this puts some heat in the system because it's "chance of a shower and 11 degrees" for the rest of the week.

I feel for ya Gemmell, my water was 17c this morning...we had a little cold snap for a couple of days and water temp dropped to 13c but recovered quite nicely...GH cover certainly helps in keeping temps a little higher

Anyone know whether getting tinted greenhouse material is much chop?

Looking at the yellow tinted stuff - but I don't really need 34m of it.

The 4m wide stuff won't be QUITE enough. I would need 4.5m wide to cover the whole thing. What really annoys me is that I missed the 6x11m duratough one that was on last week.

Then I could always get the 7.5m wide $11 a metre stuff.

Decisions decisions.

This is what redpath say about the yellow tinted greenhouse material:

The yellow offers a diffused light which aids the spread of light throughout the crop,and may assist with reduced plant stress from direct sunlight.

I don't think we suffer from "plant stress from direct sunlight" do we? Read somewhere on here that the plants get get up to 70 degrees, and so long as they have water they'll be right as rain.

Canberra in winter,,,no 70C:) maybe -70C.
Seriously you probably need to plan for some shade-cloth material for mid summer.The top part of the gravel beds are likely to get REALLY hot,,,Canberra,,,,only politcians deserve to live there,,,and quite a few solicitors.

7.5 gives you room for some more beds

Yeh, was definatley planning on making it so that you could take the ends off and throw some shade cloth over the top. It gets HOT in canberra.



Yeh, not really thinking of expansion now. Just getting it working.

Do you have a problem with the pvc warping?

I don't really know yet, it bends, but it springs back into place OK. You think it's likely to warp?

Also, was there a problem with PVC mixed with greenhouse films shortening the life of the film?

I had a pvc line over my tank that bent down a few inches. I built a shade over my welding table out of 3/4" EMT that has held up very well, its about the same price as sch. 40 pvc here.

Gemmell, if you can FIND some k rails to go across the GH it would help to make the structure ridged plus you could fix your cover material to them.

You should be able to kill two birds with the one stone using anti hotspot tape on the tubing. It`ll protect the tube from the worst of the suns direct heat and create a barrier between the poly and the pvc
I think you might need to add a support rail along the eave as the poly could sag into the gaps. You may get away with just stretching the poly taut.. if the end frames don`t pull inwards from the stress.