Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

If you do a google on cooling towers it can give you an idea of how much evap can cool somthing down.

No worries Fish Fingers. Mine kept pace with the grow beds in the sun today, but no cooling. At night we should get a bit though.

The water down the cloth may give better cooling, but maybe a bit harder to implement (???) as you said.
Also a finer mist shower head or water falling from a greater height would be good.

Yeah, I'm kicking myself for
A) Trashing a working freezer
B) Wasting a lot of time and effort trashing a working freezer to get it to cool water


Let me know how you do with your temps...

I started with 31 and im now only at 32 so im quite convinced that it works and that the freezer was a real waste of time.. not that i trashed mine i just need a couple of plugs for the 25mm holes i made. The fine shower head gave too much back pressure for the pump so i went with an old school one which like you say is not as good.
I have looked up the cooling towers and have started to make plans for a blue barrel based one but finding enough food grade parts is tricky. May have a layer of gravel on a mesh as the fill. I was going to put the fan on top to suck through but bladed fans are not very efficient used like this... so a leaf blower style in from the side might be the go.

If you're prepared to wear the evaporative losses... you can acheive cooling passively... especially in windy areas....

By the use of "bakki" showers... commonly used by serious koi keepers...





They also achieve a level of filtration... and excellent oxygenation...

The motors and fans used for roof evap Air cons run on low power. And move a lot of air. And with the increase humidity people are throwing them away and installing split systems.

Aaahh, some coolth at last..... Air temp has dropped to 30 tonight.
I managed to drop the water temp the other day with an inadvertent water change. (left the hose whilst going during a topup)
Barra and SP's are going well with no morts or cannibalism that I am aware of.
Backup air system, has kept the fish happy through a number of power outages.

I felt sorry for the chooks during the heat. So I gave them free range of the backyard.
Of all the shade, they, and their shite, reckon the veranda is the best.

The only problem being that one of the best selling points for AP is that it uses so little water.
Evaporative cooling on the other hand, uses heaps of water. Well comparatively anyhow.

Had a flat tyre today and went down and had it fixed. The tyre place is in a shed and has a evap running all the time. Cool place to work. My thinking is if you wanted to cool your fish water and greenhouse at the same time it could work out. Also if you want a higher humidity the water loss could be reduced.

An evap system with a condenser to return the water... possible?
Any thoughts ppl? - It could double as a water purifier

Kuda if the cooling saves the life of the fish 1 week a year i can handle using a few hundred litres of water to cool the water evap.

Evap cooling seems heaps more sensible than refrigeration for the same reason it can cool your house with the use of less power. Fridges are great with the door closed because they only have to keep up with the loses through the seals ect. Keep the door open on one and you will notice they don't do much to cool a room, same problem with water...only water is a much bigger heat sink than air and takes longer to both heat up and cool down.
I will be building a cooling tower even if i only use it once a summer and it only needs to counter act the slow warming of the water over many days. Basically if it knocks 2 degrees off water temp over night to keep the next days max at the same as the previous it has done its job.

Agreed, less power than refrig. Refrig is much worse, I was just pointing out that getting fish with no cooling required would suit the BYAP goals better.
One week a year? ok, I guess you're right, it would be acceptable.

But seriously do you bother condensing the steam from your shower and using it to brush your teeth?

Cooling towers with all the bio film buildup would you need to worry about leaginers disease

Yes agreed and that is a real concern if they were to run all the time and not get cleaned. There are a few ways around this though, one way is to run chlorinated water in the unit itself and have an element type heat exchange going on inside it like a coil. Would need stainless to get good results i should think and still this would really hurt it's effectiveness.
What i want to build would only be used for emergencies and then cleaned out well. Im thinking of a blue barrel with a strong fan blowing in through the side near the bottom and the cold water exiting through bottom.
The media to use inside the unit is the real unknown atm because i want to be able to pick this thing up and move it around on a sack truck. Maybe something like glass marbles supported in a sling type arrangement that i could lift out and clean.
Let me know if you have any ideas F&F.

I think most are missing the point its a lot easier to heat than cool as far as cooling yes it would be nice to have the biggest trout but at what cost and what degree of difficulty from now on i am just going with the flow [when its cool enough trout when its warmer silvers or what ever]
Another thing i would rather have 100 nice size trout that i can harvest from 300 gr on than 20 = 2 kg ones that one mistake and there all gone
The people at the trout farm say the best size to eat trout is 1/2 kg [they should know ]