Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have been toying with the idea of using pond liner in shipping containers as fish tanks and growing talapia in 18in of water. For every six 40 foot fish tanks I will use one40 foot as a slump. The slump is devided in two, the large section is were all the tanks drain directly, the small section is where the tanks feed from. The submersable pump is pumping from the large drain to the small feed section.

What filtration do you envisage you'll need....How many fish do you intend to stock??

Don't know what the price of used containers.. and/or liner are in Barbados....

But a properly built RAS using aquaculture tanks might well be more cost effective... and profitable...

Here is a quick skech. I am thinking about using the roof as a grow bed, haven't even looked at if there is any benifit to shipping containers other than the fact that I can sell them quickly and i could build such a system in days with a small impact on the enviourment. If will have to look into if it is cost effective. As for filtration I want to dump the slump tank daily to the flow through plant side and refill with fresh water.

So are you looking to build a "commercial" system.. or sell "commercial" systems...

Either way... but sorry... they wont be commercially viable...

Google podponics - they are doing AP in containers and is expanding and expanding their container farm. Costly business? Are you trying to emulate them?

There's quite a few "shipping container" systems being hawked around.. greenhouses on top etc...

Many are being hawked as "commercial".... they're not.. and never will be...

Most aren't any bigger.. or can be any bigger... than a family backyard aquaponic system...

The only thing that's bigger than a backyard system... is the cost....

I am looking to build a commercial system for 3 people to operate at this stage I am going on size alone, I think that the control I would have over a system like this at this size I should be able to make a profit. I am now going to try to convince you Rupert that it is viable with numbers.

I will calculate the volume of 1 full container as 35 feet long 8 feet wide and 2 feet deep making the system capable of holding 111 m3 of water

stocking at 40kg/m3 means I can carry Max 4440kg of fish percycle.(10months)

Now have to check and see if that can par for it self I can get a container in place for 5000us making the system cost around 70 000us sounds like alot don't it.

This is the first time I have heard of podponics and will search them up now, I hope their are sussesfull at it that would mean I can be too.

Why can't a shipping container be used as a commercial system rupert

Because it's too small.... you can't grow enough plants on top of it to be worth anything...

If you just want it to house a few small RAS fish tanks.. and you can get the container cheap... have fun...

If you want to cut the tops of... line them.. to make a big fish tank.. great....but unless you design the rest of the system to RAS principles... you wont be stocking at those densities.. and that number of fish...

Oh, by the way..."podponics" appears to actually just be a hydroponic plant system.. in a shipping container.. growing under lights...

Check out this google link to see some of the "aquaponic" ideas... there's lots of them.. all as silly as the rest...

https://www.google.com.au/search?source ... 0XrslV_43I

http://www.ceres.org.au/greentech/Proje ... onics.html
That one shows some promice.
The podponics is hydro, under lights as stated before not really the same thing but I will keep my eye on them still.

How I am going about it with my system design is to operait the fish side as a RAS system and do water changes to maintain water quality and grow the most fish per squear foot constantly.

And then size the plant side big enough to handle the dayly dumping of the fish waste.

I suggest you build yourself a system first.. and run it for a year...

Then attend a RAS aquaculture course... or the UVI training... add a hydroponics course as well...

Then think about consulting....

Or fly to India... and join up with Nanniode..

In places that have to import everything, and have little to export, containers come cheap. As the US's exports tend to be bulk commodities, they get shredded up here and sent back to china as scrap. The liner would likely be the largest cost. I am sure there will be a steep learning curve, but I would not say it is impossible. Damian, learn all you can about RAS, a big part of it is that you don't dump your water any more than needed. The Timmons yellow book on Recirculating Aquaculture is considered worth it's weight in gold. Be prepaid to invest a fair bit of capital in support equipment. That would be in filtration and test equipment. In a commercial setting you are going to need a bit more than just an API Master Freshwater Kit. DO meters, refractometers, Imhoff cones, there will be a lot of pieces, you might want to add a container just to house your lab. The Hydroponic side means that you are circulating your nutrient rich water constantly, not dumping it, as you said. If you just dumped it, the DO would be too low for the plants. Were you planing on keeping the containers whole, or splitting them and using them as two halves open to sunlight?

Me too... been about 13 years now!

Exactly, Podponics are hydroponics team and they are a successful lot, looking at the way they are growing with multiple containers in different parts of their country and their FB updates.

Yours is a novel idea, which is great - AP in such containers look promising, as you rightly said. You would need to work out how you would reduce the temperature that would build up inside those containers. It is a big cost for them.

For temp issues I plan to have them touching each other long ways and to havemedia beds on the roof under a simple shade house.


If i stock at Max and sell fillets at 2$ a kg, asumeing a fillet is .3 of a whole fish would mean I can get $29600.5434 every 10 month fish cycle.

Before I could calculate ROI I would have to calculate the cost of running the system. It would need a big pump maybe more than one pump but this system will have a very low head difference, a foot the most, that should make it run very effishently, I want to just dump the slumps at night, and replace with fresh clean water, hoping that would be enough to ensure a chemicaly optimum water that I can keep my fish growing quickly.

How much do you turn over water? And how much oxygen do you have to ingect?