Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

So I've compiled a lot of information over the last year or so thanks to you all and I think my wife is warming up to having a greenhouse in the yard. Since I'm a long-term planner, here's what I have so far. Please rip it apart and tell me what mistakes I'm making. Suggestions, advice, comments, complaints, and mockery are all welcome. Goal is to feed a family of 4.

Details as of now:

Total Fish: 2100 Gallons (~8000L)

Total Media: 1080 Gallons (~4000L)
Total DWC: 1700 Gallons (~6500L)

12' x 16' (3.6mx4.8m) Insulated Fish House for Tilapia (Largest I can go without a permit)
1 - 600 Gallon (2271L) Fry/Yabby Tank
2 - 750 Gallon (2839L) Tilapia Tank

12' x 30' (3.6mx9m) Hoop house (Not a permanent structure so no permit needed... I hope)
25' x 4.25' DWC Raft for passive heating and oh so tasty plants
12 - 2'x4'x18" raised beds
1 - box or swirl filter

Water Flows from Tanks -> Raised Beds -> Box/swirl filter -> DWC (Hopefully all CHIFT PIDWC). Water levels topped off from rainwater cistern.

Worries as of now:

1. Water Heating. I'm in Zone 7-8 (0-20F)
2. Hoop house heat loss (No idea as to how much heat will be lost)
3. Electric consumption (Solar water heaters? Purchase more stock in the electric company?)
4. Is that enough media for filtration? More growbeds, smaller DWC?

I want to build a tunnel greenhouse in the back yard. Half with shadecloth and half with plastic. Steel rails on the floor so the gb's can be moved from shadecloth to plastic depending on the time of year. A fish tank on wheels could also be moved under the plastic for winter I guess.

Moving stuff around would be cool but the plumbing changes would be evil.

Duff, mates own allsun farm http://gundarootiller.com.au/ and they move the poly tunnels 24m x 6m on skids, runners, and ball bearings, from soil bed to soil bed. They tie it in place to the fixed runners with fencing wire. So rather than move the beds and tanks, the shade or poly shelter could move. May not suit your situation, but........

Goola , may i please have the opportunity to quote on your power supply, I can see a few hundred thousand dollars worth.
You want to grow a heat loving fish in an area that has 0F ( -17C ) temps ,, mate ,, I'd be rethinking that one.

Chappo is right. Even with the greenhouse, you're not going to be storing that much heat overnight during winter.

Since you plan to have 2 tanks anyways, you might do overlapping seasonal fish. Something like:

tank 1: winter - yabbie/mussel, spring to fall - tilapia/yabbie/mussel
tank 2: fall to spring - trout/yabbie/mussel - summer yabbie/mussel

Have you thought about a native North American fish like trout.

Goola , let me put it this way ..... I would like to grow Barramundi ( sea bass) through winter here in Sydney Australia. Sea bass have similiar want of warm water as Tilapia. I am still working on the heating options etc and REMEMBER I am in Sydney , near the coast ,, the coldest mornings are almost never 8C (46 F thingies) and followed by daytime temps often around 16-18 C ( 61 -64 F thingies).
Even though I am fighting a much smaller problem it will still take considerable amounts of power to keep things warm.
In your situation I think you will need double layered / perhaps triple layered polycarbonate type hot house and the best insulation money can buy, even then you would need a heck of a lot of energy input.

Have you thought of bubble wrap- you usually get it as a packing material in things you order. If you used a double poly that was inflated with a small air pump (see greenhouse manufacturers for such items) to make a dead air space and made a third inside layer with bubblewrap, you would still get sunlight into the greenhouse and maybe conserve enough heat. I would also suggest making a solar greenhouse with a small solid knee wall on the North side (or build your fish house on that side), and with greater Southern exposure and using black plastic around the plants and in the walkways and even adding black barrels full of water to store daytime heat. If you google solar greenhouses, they have tons of advise on building one and other things that you can do to keep temps up. Don't underestimate the power of passive solar heating.

BTW what are the demensions of your DWC, that could double as your heat sump- I plan to use panda fabric as a covering (cut with holes for planting) for my rafts instead of painting them and as this fabric is reversible, I can use it to direct heat into the DWC pond (plants may suffer or not be a viable option but my deal is temp control for the fish- plant production is secondary)- that is what I intend to do to maintain winter temps as well as using black/white panda fabric to control evaporation and heat transfer to the single but large gravel grow bed. The other thing I did was build a 6' wood fence as a sort of solar green house design. Wind for me comes from the West mostly but I am on the East side of a small hill and there is also a tree to block heavy winter winds- the last thing I need is for my greenhouse to become a parasail. All of these details are to protect the greenhouse from excessive exposure to potential heat loss as well as increasing the chances of potential heat gain in the winter. The more I can control temperature passively, the less I'll have to spend on heating and cooling.

Here's another idea on heat storage. Here's a greenhouse with a solid concrete wall on the north (?not sure about this one, can't remember.) side and a compost pile built right on it. The idea is to use the compost pile to extend the heat storage of the wall and at the same time help insulate it. Heat is also generated from composting activity, cool! This greenhouse was housing tilapia in it when I last saw it, I'm pretty sure it's still in operation.

There's a guy in Minnesota that heats his greenhouse with compost piles. I don't know what his min and max temps over winter are though. Might be worth trying if you have a lot of composting to do (or available).

The Russians in Siberia park trucks over compost piles to stop the sumps freezing and enable the trucks to start. That said in a domestic situation getting enough material to get a pile going through the winter, in suburban context, may prove problematic.

I'm in the warmer half of zone 9 here in central FL.
We get a lot of good sun in the winter but the days are a bit shorter and the angle not as good so I was not able to keep my system warm enough for tilapia over winter without having to spend electricity heating their water. And even then, I only just kept them alive, not warm enough to really eat or grow over the colder months. Granted, my system has no DWC to help keep it as warm. Flood and Drain gravel beds do loose a lot of heat during cold winter nights. Even if you can design a system that can keep the tilapia alive over winter, I doubt that you will be very satisfied with the tilapia or plant performance over winter.

Here is what I struggled with over winter. During the day it could be quite sunny and warm so to try and recover some of the warmth to my water I would leave the greenhouse or cold frames sealed up even during the day. This helped some on the water temps but was really hard on many of the plants. Nights were still too cool for tropical plants to thrive though they did survive. Daytime temps got so hot in a sealed up cold frame/greenhouse that most of the cool weather plants suffered terribly and not even the tomatoes really did much but get infested with mites. The hot peppers seemed to be the only thing to do at all well through the winter in my sealed up AP system. Next winter I don't intend to struggle to keep the tilapia over winter, If I happen to have fry or fingerlings in late fall, they can come into the aquarium till they get put back out in late spring.

Channel Catfish will do just fine here year round and I'll stick with them as my primary fish though we do enjoy tilapia too.

As to the system design. I know for the traditional Flood and drain system we like to see grow bed volumes equal to and up to twice as much as the fish tank volumes. I'm running about 1500 gallons of flood and drain gravel to about 900 or so gallons of fish tank. I don't think I want to go any less on the solids filtration for my system. I only have around 165 fish in that system, most of them under a pound in size. I think you want your flood and drain media beds to be equal to the volume of your fish tanks if you can unless you are planning very low stocking densities.

Thanks Chappo. I understand that I'm doing things the hard way. Kinda why I posted this design was to get the brains here working to figure out how to grow a hot fish in cold areas without tons of power. Passive solar greeny is exactly what I'm trying to figure out using this as a base for design. If I have to build a double paned house, so be it, but if Angies double poly & bubble wrap works. HUZZAH!!! Normally speaking the temperatures only drop to 35-45 in the winter. We rarely hit the 0's but it can happen and if it does, well, then the electric company will be happy. I want to switch off fish via season. Tilapia in the summer and trout in the winter. That way I only have to heat the tilapia tanks in the fish house.

ThePromenade - Yes, I plan to grow rainbow trout as well, but plan to use Tilapia fry as feed.

Angie - Currently the Fish house is on the south side, but I can switch it to the north pretty easy. However, there is already a 6' fence on both the north and west sides. The DWC was my idea for adding a lot of water mass to the GH but still keeping it as usable space. I can always add black buckets underneath the growbeds as well. The dimensions of the DWC are 25' x 4.5'. This way I can use 3 sheets of standard 4x8 foam from home depot.

What is panda fabric? All I could find on google was fabric with pandas on it.

someguy - Awesome idea on the compost. Have to think about how to implement that.

What if the growbeds were also insulated?



This was one of my main worries but that might be easily remedied by using one tank to flood. Tilapia in one tank, Trout in the other. Flood the beds with Tilapia in the summer and Trout in the winter? I'd have to add a filter of sorts for the tank not being used to flood, but does that sound feasible?