Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I solve the sleep problem by just not doing it.

And if for some strange reason I do go to bed, I try to do all the cad work in my head, in my sleep.

It doesn't work or anything, but you can pretend you are achieving something while you dream, and as a result, the bit of you that keeps shouting "Get out of bed add build something!" calms down for a bit.

That and scotch

For the rest of us, it's called AP insomnia.

I still build with liner but I quit using the wood. The metal rails definitely cost more than the wood but they won't support termites.
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/ever-changing
But for gravel beds I still use rubbermaid stock tanks mostly.

If you are heating the water above 52 F don't think of it like the 52 F ground is helping you heat because when your heated water drains back into the tank in the ground, the ground will be trying to take some of that heat away from it. If the ground temperature doesn't match your desired water temperature, you are better off insulating. While in winter the 52 F ground might help a bit keeping your water temp above freezing it won't really help you keep your water temp warm. And you want to put as much thermal mass into your greenhouse as you can since the air temperature in a flood and drain system will actually have a large effect on your water temp since every time the beds drain the air is drawn down into the bed to exchange some temperature with the gravel and on the next flood the water will get some of that temperature from the gravel.

However, if you decide to do trout, having the ground coupling would actually be a good thing since you want to keep the water cool in summer for them.

I wish trout was an option here in San Diego... I do enjoy my tilapia, but I read about the trout excitement on some threads, and I get a little envious. I would imagine finding a trout fishery should not be too hard in Washington.

Oh, man. I am feeling terribly inadequate. JT does everything so NEATLY. He even digs holes neatly. My dirt *never* stays all organized like that! I'm happy just to get it to stay out of the randomly-shaped hole long enough for me to put in whatever I was digging the hole for in the first place. I have very undisciplined dirt.

I feel like the more I read, the more questions I have. Really, though, I think it's that I am starting to fill in details in my vague overall plan, which is making me see how many other details are actually missing. Plumbing, for instance. I *love* playing with PVC. (One of my favorite things is to wander the aisles of Lowes / Home Depot looking at stuff and thinking, "What *else* could I use that for?" There are a lot of "what else" things besides plumbing you can do with PVC!) But I know absolutely nothing about plumbing. What size pipe to use where, for instance, and which sorts of fittings get used in which sort of connections, and how to make them not leak. I bet I learned stuff back in that fluid dynamics class I took my first time through college so many years ago (dang, how can I have graduated more years ago than I am old???) that would have come in real handy now, if I had any memory of it besides the name of the class and the fact that I was violently morning sick through the entire thing.

I also don't know much about putting pieces of lumber together. I'm realizing that while trying to turn a garden shed porch into a goat shed. (Why did the garden shed have a porch to begin with? My life is just FULL of mysteries right now.) There are so many decisions to make just in fastening two pieces of wood together. Should they overlap this way, or that way? One way often makes more sense to my engineering brain from a load-bearing standpoint, but baffles me when it comes to figuring out how to fasten it together when "that way" means the screws would need to be four inches long just to get all the way through.

And then there are my wimpy girl muscles to contend with, and the fact that I've started building stuff in preference to unpacking, since the weather is nice right now and I'd rather do outdoors stuff. But that means half our tools are still in a box somewhere that probably hasn't been unpacked through the last 3 moves (I was in school for nearly a decade, and hubs was working too many jobs to have time for using tools), so finding them without unpacking *everything* is a hopeless task. Hubs' solution is just to buy another one of whatever we need, because he likes buying tools. Which would be a fun solution if we didn't have to pay bills and stuff.

That's how I did it when I was an engineer. Since I ended up working mostly in software, it worked out okay. If I went to work sleep-deprived, it just took a little longer (and a bit more caffeine) to get my code to work. But now if I go to work sleep-deprived I might prescribe the wrong dose of medication to someone, or something, and that prospect takes all the fun out of flaunting respectable sleep schedules. Being a grownup is such a pain sometimes.

But I'll worry about that tonight when I have to go to bed on time so I can work tomorrow. TODAy I am going to get this Sketchup thing under control. And think about grow bed sizes, shapes, and heights.

Here's my first shot at it. Mostly I was just looking at how things might fit, and what measurements might work best as far as getting things sized right while making the best use of standard lumber lengths and stuff. I even made myself the right height, and everything. (I'm freakishly tall, so it will be handy to see how I fit among all the stuff in my greenhouse.) There aren't any grow beds yet, just benches, and I was playing with using my Rubbermaid tank (and another one) as the sump, and seeing how much I'd have to dig them in to fit them underneath the benches, but then you came along with your multiple-height growbed/sump ideas and now I'll probably throw this all out and start over.



Up until now I've been planning it all down one side of the greenhouse, thinking that eventually I'd mirror the whole thing down the other side. But I'm starting to consider just going for broke and filling up the whole greenhouse on the first pass, which would also change everything. I sure am doing a lot of mind-changing lately!

Ah, what can we do with PVC? Let me count the ways...
Try this link for some ideas. (Just don't build your greenhouse out of them.)

No, no, no. Don't feel inadequate. You are good at what you do. And there is always something more to learn. You have to start somewhere, might as well be with a bunch of people that want to help out. The more you learn, the better you will be able to assimilate new ideas and embrace new technology. Then all of a sudden, you are giving advice to other people just starting out. Hhhmmm how did that happen?

I love Lowes!

Is the white in the photos plastic sheeting attached to the metal rails? Wow. I'll have to dig into your forums and find out more!


That makes sense. In the Sketchup drawing above, I had to sink the Rubbermaid tanks into the ground 10" to make them fit, and keep them lower than everything else. I don't really know how much that counts as "coupling," though.


What counts as thermal mass? The fish tank? Or the fish tank and the sump?


Trout are starting to sound pretty good. Is there a table somewhere of temperature ranges for various fish? And expected growth sizes? Surely in a hobby where there are people who can dig perfectly-squared holes and fit entire amazing AP systems into tiny patios, there must be people with obsessive spreadsheet-and-table-making tendencies already. I can't possibly be the first.

Any water, rock and anything dense in the greenhouse counts as thermal mass. People will often fill any unused space with black buckets or barrels of water in a greenhouse. Others will do things like run large piping under the ground in a greenhouse and blow or suck air through them to be able to cool/heat the air depending on the season.

As to JT's work, don't worry, he puts most of our workmanship to shame but he is a great example. His wicking beds look great.

Plumbing and pipe sizes. Here is a link to the plumbing class slides of the presentation I just gave at the Aquaponics Association Conference 2012 Aquaponics Plumbing Class
That should perhaps get you started on some ideas to help you ask more questions.

The White liner I use in those metal rail beds is Durascrim liner. It is polyethylene with fiber reinforcement so it doesn't stretch the way many types of liner would. It is good stuff for making rectangular shaped beds. It is totally inappropriate for irregular ornamental ponds. For ornamental type ponds or round liner tanks, I will still use EPDM pondguard liner.

Nah, I got one of these: http://www.stevesgreenhouses.com. He's right up the road from us, so I went and had a tour, and liked what I saw. Practical, sturdy, no-frills, and 'way more space than I could have otherwise afforded. Plus I found out we both grew up as Air Force brats in the same part of Japan. I don't often meet kids from the old neighborhood; it was kinda cool.


Aww, thanks. I love to learn new things. And I am good at a lot of stuff. But I'm also not good at a lot of other stuff. Fortunately the stuff I'm not good at is generally uninteresting stuff, so it all works out. The thing I am working on learning, now that I'm not a starving grad student any more, is paying other people do the uninteresting stuff that I'm not good at but need done anyway, so I have more time to do the interesting stuff. I'm really bad at that, but I'm getting better.

Huh. Too bad my greenhouse isn't taller. Using barrels of water as bench supports would save me a lot of carpentering!

(I'm pretty dense sometimes. Maybe it will help things if I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse!)


Awesome, thanks!


Ahhh, okay, that's among the snippets of advice I've got saved in my Evernote "don't forget this" AP file.

Take your time and unpack all your tools, will save time and money. At the moment I am sorting out my tools for another move in 12 months time. That means going through the gear we packed away to go to Hong Kong, the gear I bought in Hong Kong, the gear I first bought here instead of unpacking.

How many of each tool do you need, better to speand your money on your system and a good bottle of Red to finish of the day. Cheers

That means I have to unpack *everything*, just to find them. I *hate* unpacking. I guess it's inevitable, though. *sigh* I figured out a while back I've moved on average every 18 months in my entire life. And I'm 51 years old.

This is IT. Next time I move, it's gonna be to a nursing home!

I'm still working my way through the early days of his forum. Getting lots of ideas on carpentry, but every time he starts talking about the plumbing, all the photo links are broken. *sigh*

I hate moving too. I just moved to a farm. It isn't fun moving tons and tons of gravel.