Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

How comes no one has converted a shipping container to an ap system? I know of people that housed ap systems inside of shipping containers, but recently i was thinking of turning one of them into an actual solar powered ap system.

After all they have an area of 67.6m3 and if I was to use a depth of 1m or there about I would have a fish tank of 28220L (once my calculations are correct) and that would make for a grow bed of roughly the same volume, has any one done this before?
In theory that’s 304.2 kilos of fish per crop.

Can you guys think of a reason that this would not work? I am currently in the design phase and just running some numbers.

What do you guys think?
Can it be done?

Damian.

Someone has done pretty much that with their fish tank. They got an old open lid container off the back if a truck and painted the inside.

Can't remember who. It eventually started leaching stuff into the system so they canned it.

Also for 300kg of fish your looking at 30000 lt of grow bed, unless u run a purpose built filtration system with larger active surface area and solids removal bedew grow beds.

On a home/non-commercial level it ended up being too big for the guy based on the number of fish he could stock per his growbeds. He could never find the little buggers in that huge tank!

LOL a case of the lost fish!!

I wouldn’t paint the inside i would line it with some pond liner to avoid the leaching problem, who knows what was in the container prior. But can it whole the weight of the water, grow bed media and plants?

I believe you will have to run the fish end of a system like that the same way you would run a fish farm, meaning using the same water flow and filtration.

I also think that this would allow your plant side to perform much more "commercially acceptable" for the space your using.

it would be nice if i could get directions to that thread though.

Aquatieco had a liner listed in their catalog for converting dumpsters to fish tanks, made me go Hmm..

http://www.aquaticeco.com/subcategories ... -Fish-Tank

Am I wrong, but isn't the fish stocking ratio, 3 kg harvestable fish per 100l of GB, so it should be something around 850kg harvestable fish?

(28220/100=282,2 282,2*3=846,6)

I looked at using shipping containers but the engineering did it in. A shipping container was too deep for a tank and while you could use one for a GB the energy required to lift the water either into or from such a tall GB wasn't a good idea (IMO).

However, cutting a container in half would make two great tanks i thought. The problem was cutting it in half safely and then the work that would have needed to be done to strengthen the sides so that they did not bow out. I had a number of solutions to this but my fish guy didn't like any of them.

The final nail in the coffin was that we wanted to build the tanks and GBs with a building system that was more flexible than the fixed modules that using shipping containers would dictate.

Thanks for that info dave, i bookmarked that for sure. i am more interested in the 40 foot, so i hope they make them as well. $137 for a 20 foot liner ent bad at all.

ALL INTERESTING POINTS stuart, the engineering is the tricky part for sure, i was thinking cut the top panel from the inside and drop it down 3 feet to maintain the structural integrity. i might have to cut out some windows to the side and a extra frame to stop it from bowing out.

of course i would be paying someone to do this as i don’t know how to i just want to find the best way to do it.

Yeah it was the paying someone to do it that really added to the cost. concrete worked out being cheaper and easier to work with.

The simplest engineering solution was once you have cut them in half to get two tank frames 1.2m that you add ties across the width of the tanks. My fish guy thought that this would make the tank too hard to work with at grading and harvesting times.

I've always thought to use a shipping container as growbeds / green roof for a room ( made out of another shipping container )
got some little sketches somewhere but they're not worth scanning in

I figured to cut one in thirds lengthways - weld the doors closed, two cuts down the door section ( one down the middle of each door ) and all the way along the roof & base, removing the long middle roof/base/ends
push the sides over giving me two 70cm or so deep growbeds the full length of the container with whatever the height of the container is being the width of the growbed

needs bracing, lining, more than two bags of hydroton and a serious pump ( pool pump ? ), but that's one ( two ! ) hell of a growbed roof

Sorry I missed that he would be using a growbed of the same size and that he was quoting 300kg based on something to do with the size of the fist tank. So yea u are right.

My calc was wrong any way. It should have been 300/3*100=10000. So yea, a shipping container would support up to around 850kg.

But i tend to think along the lines of Charlie. It's too much stuffing around. It would be easier to build long troughs up to 30000 lt running constant flood and then buy a 20000lt water tank or something for FT. I think the grow space would be far more manageable.

Being done in Atlanta, GA...again...ALOT of claims...
For your enjoyment, perusal, laughter...(you choose your verb)

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... 91/#slide2

http://www.podponics.com/

Joel, Not advertising nor plugging...remove the links if appropriate...

Brian

One ready-made criticism is why if they are concerned about food miles, energy use etc. are they using electric lighting? Is it so hard to take advantage of the free light bulb in the sky that so many of these concepts must use electric bulbs?

Is it actually profitable to use elecric lighting... as opposed to free natural lighting???

Yes, depends on circumstance/context (latitude comes to mind) and usually in daylight extension of a few hours rather than substitution. Adding a few hours of artificial daylight to trick a fruiting plant to flower and set can be profitable, as can doing the same for chooks to keep them laying through winter.