Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

would that count as perpetual motion?

cool, if it were possible!

Some of the energy might be able to be regained, but not all to be certain.
I really don't see energy to be a real issue here. We have technologies availiable to us that are clean. They just are expensive. The thought of an aquaponics forest is expensive too. Its just a matter of scale.
Its all just for discussion and for the sake of thought.

I don't understand why you are discrediting a sequential, gravity feed system.

A small tree might use 25L/day, and a thousand trees, 25kL. If you're adding 25kL of water to your system a day I don't see any benefit to returning any. More interesting would be to put a huge inflated greenhouse over the whole thing and try to condense the water on the film for reuse. Diamond film is becoming available and would be ideal for this - superlative thermal conductivity, UV impervious, high tensile strength and high light transmission.

Who's doing what to who's whatsit?

have you seen footage of the HUGE greenhouses in Spain ("can be seen from the Moon") they call it the sea of plastic (or something similar)

Those are small structures repeated over large areas, I'm thinking a single greenhouse 1km in diameter. Perhaps inflated, perhaps suspended over a valley, or perhaps a buckydome.

I wonder what the limits are.

Limits are $$$$$$$$$

The hydro dude at the aqua lectures was involved in doing research to do with super greenhouses in which all sort of fruit trees would be grown. Led lights would be used as the light source.

I have seen the greenhouses in Spain. Up close. After the beauty of the old Moorish neighborhood in Granada, the lulling calmness of the medditerranean, and the wonderful timeless villages of the Alpujarras mountains, the huge acres of grow houses were jarring. Very depressing, mile after mile after mile of green houses, many of which are abandoned with flopping plastic and weeds.

I have also bee to the Eden project, which is a series of huge domes in Cornwall in UK. I went there to look at their cacao when i was working for a UK based chocolate company. That was very impressive! It requires massive amounts of external energy, though.

I think that while if you had a pond or lake with hight stocking densities of fish you could do some sort of pumping to stop eutrophication, but... some problems would happen including siltation.

As there is soil involved in this theoretical application, you run the risk of having nutrients, minerals and soil cascade down your watershed to your pond. While the plants could take out all of the nitrogen in the water, the water could carry soil to the pond.

Its an interesting concept, but I don't see it ever happening. On that scale aits hard to compete with a natural rainfed system.

I assumed infinite $$$$. Even if we have infinite $ there are many things that are impossible.

VB: LEDs are not very efficient for producing PAR.

Christopher, My thoughts to avoid soil migration into fish tanks are to base it off of a larger mass of water, where water is drawn into the fishtanks as needed, allowing a large area of settlement for silt.
Eutrophication shouldn't be too much of an issue because of the huge area of biofiltration, plus the usage of the nitrogen and phosphorus for growbed vegetable production.



Thanks for your input thus far,...impossible? I've never heard the word before. What language is that?

Hayden

I was merely pointing out that ye canna break the laws of fuzzicks.

Raimiuso... there's lots of reed pond systems employed around the world for filtration both for water input and output. Placing an AP system within that sort of loop isn't a lot different from what the bloke at the Institute in Aquaculture - Scotland (Charlie) is proposing to do...

See here Charlie - Scotland

Amen for mushroom and berry pickings. Same wiht in canada there are lots of groundcover in the pne forests. But as i saw in oz pinforest there mostly comercial had no ground cover. Probalby because there are no native species in the are designed to live in the soil condtions in a pine forest.