Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Exactly the water will drain from one and equilise in the others leaving the fish in the slump if you want.

Another benifit of using shipping containers is that you can have above ground pipe work. You can spot and fix leakge from the system easier than conventional buried pipe style.you can also sell your containers when it becomes cost effective to do so.

If i can work out the actual cost of this system I suspect it will be more finanatialy sound route than normal fish tanks as you are discribeing.

How much does a shipping container cost you?

It cost $5000 us with immediate resale price of $2500 for up to ten years.

The higher up front cost of the shipping containers is not enough of a detering factor when I take all other factors into account. I think a true calculation of the Return On Investment(ROI) to determine exactly how cost efetive both systems are is called for......... One factor is start up time, a container system could be up and running a full 3 months before a conventional concrete system first batch of fries. That a good head start and time well spent growing units. There are other factors we have yet to look at that may effect the actual cost of tanks used. Using white liner and UV lights may increase efishency givine that you now have total control of the 6 feet air over your water, I suspect the increased control over your system closeing it from outside influences increases your survival rate enough to warent looking into further.

40 hours * $16/hr = $640, for 40 weeks = $25600, but you said you wanted 3 full time workers, so the wages will cost over $75000. With fish sales of under $30000 per 7 container system, plus the cost of containers, fish, pumps, LOX, electricity, etc means you will be making a huge loss from day 1! I think you will need them to be working a lot more than 14 containers, and you'll need a lot of "investors" to fund the operation.

I think its best I find out the true cost of operating at full capasty then find out what is the lowest fish sales to support running at full speed, then run the system at optimal needed to suport the said number of fish to help ensure finansal suscess. I have been looking at some more numbers like how much it will cost to run.

To turn the water over once an hour daily I would need 14, pumps running constantly @ 700w a pump pushing 4280gph each, will cost me $3304 to buy and $ 1434us for 31 days or 3645.6kwh or $14340 a fish cycle.

I calculated the feed amount useing 1.6 to 1.8 as the feed to weight ratio making me need 8701lbs of feed per cycle, I currently pay $1 per pound of feed, bulk is way less. Thats 175 bags of 50 pound bags of feed. Going to need some storage.

Thanks for the correction, 16hr is alot of money I can get away with lowering to $12. Its good when you can put these things on paper that you can see how to make it work. How much containers do you invision? The foot print of 50 by 100f is 1/3 of a AP system making the total foot print with plants aproxamately 100 by 150.feet. which is about 1/2 to 1/3 the size of the average chicken farm, so I may even have to go bigger to be profitable. For now I will look at the current 14 container size. And tweak till I am comfortable.

700W/per pump for 14 pumps could be a showstopping overhead. Surely you can do much better than that.

I don't know whether your gallons are Imperial or US but, according to your figures, you will be pumping between 16,200LPH and 19,500LPH through each of your 14 containers. There are 16,000LPH and 22,000LPH pumps available that are economically priced and draw only a fraction of 700W. You wouldn't need a pump that handles a lot of head so something like this may do you.

Those pumps are way more economical, thank for opening my eyes to this way better option, do you have any more? What you think about desil powered pumps? Something we will have to look into. But using the pumps you suggested drops reocuring expenditure some what. I have to look into changing the labour cost some what, I originoly went with 3 workers with the hydro side in mine I believe its best to islote fish labour from plant labour, they should be different rates as well. This is just ball park but I believe a fish system like this could be run with 1.5 workers or 60 man hours a week. @ $13 hr = $31200 in wages per cycle.

Back to the pumps, when i look at water I think of it as one whole system, forget useable fish tank space and all of that, if need be we can grow units in the slump as well, the 7 containers as a whole holds 111002.038L when full. I am assuming a turn over of once per hour is adiquit (please let me know if you thing otherwise) I would need to move that amount of water every hour. Using the members from the jebao pump I would need

5 pumps to do the job but they have a rating of 50w at 22000Lph so i will go with 10 pumps(=2×turn over), on 24/7 at a running cost of $ 1389.65 per fish cycle, my hopes are back up!

Lets look at harvesting fish the most productive way, Max flow rating for 8 in pipe under gravity is 57000gph meaning I could drain a full fish tank in half hour, and devise a way to load in a shipping ready container. A 4 inch pipe will take 2 hours and a 2.5 will take 6hr. The length and amounts of fittings will remain constant but I have yet to work that out. I want to get a idea of 8in stainless steel pipe and fittings cost. What do you think about the harvesting idea, with the pipes.

Witch bring me to the concept of automation to reduce labour cost, a auto matic feeder system using container walls to gain a lager feed area than a conventional belt feed type could increase production and efishence with smaller more frequent feedings all so a auto adjusting stand pipe would be good a edition to control water level remotely.



Come on don't play shy with your ideas

Making commercial systems cheaper is what I have been working on for 6 years. I have studied different materials, components, every aspect that of constructing and designing AP systems to lower the capital costs or if not lower them to use the capital more efficiently and/or make the systems more robust, stable and reliable. This is my specialty.

Raising fish and growing plants I know how to do but in a commercial operation I would employ/partner with others who have made aquaculture or greenhouse management their specialty.

That body of knowledge I have developed is not going to be given away for free but I can often you some pointers or ask you questions to get you in moving in the right direction.

I looked at using containers for commercial systems and while they will work well with appropriate modification there were other options that were cheaper and better.

The two big problems with containers is the cost of labour to modify them (many of the tasks Rup mentioned in an earlier post) and the relative cost of containers to other cheaper better materials.

Labour may not be a problem because labour may be cheap for you. Even realtively skilled labour like steel cutting and welding.

At $5000ea I would be really surprised if there are not other options available to you that would be cheaper/better.

Consider a container cut in half to make two FTs raceways which you said you wanted to do. The m2 cost of the structural skin of your FT is then $~70/m2 (using 40' as the length of the conatiner).

Locally I can get containers to use for tanks for $2500 which drops the cost to $35/m2. But there are other materials available to me that cost between $30-$45/m2 and come ready to install. ie they are ready to use unlike containers which have to be extensively modified before they can be used.

So by using containers you are using a construction material that is more expensive by the approximate amount of money that it will take you to modify them into a usable material.

You mentioned speed of construction as another benefit. You can only state this as a benefit if you have an accurate idea of how long it will take to modify a container versus building a tank out of other materials.

Cutting up steel containers takes time and then you have to move great big pieces of steel that have lost their structural integrity. Moving half a container without damaging it is no easy task. Once in position you have to reinforce the sides to resist the water pressure, line it and cap the top edge presumably to hold the liner in place but also to make the ragged steel edge safe. Now if you thought ahead you could save yourself some time because hopefully you could get one half to fall into place after being cut but you still have to move the other one even if it is only a few feet left or right.

If we were to have a race I could have a 2.4m (w) x 12.1m (L) x 1.2m (D) tank up and ready to go days before your containers was close to ready with one skilled labourer (builder or similar) and unskilled labour to lift, carry, hold and fix.

You also talked about making 0.6m beds/tanks and these while lighter are even harder to move because they have no structural integrity at all once cut.

In another post you talked about keeping the containers whole for fish tanks?



While this will lesson the structural reinforcing required and remove the majority of your modification costs it will make handling the fish challenging and will not give you any additional control over your culture environment. If your were to add insulation, heating, coolng and ventilation components then you would have control but the box by itself does nothing. That is what your protective cropping structure is for whether it be a greenhouse, pole and tension wire cover or similar.

All the above I have written to demonstrate the value of what I have written below.

If you are serious about this venture then some professional help might be a good idea. I am not either an aquaculture or hydroponic professional but I know enough of the engineering principles and production processes to take the input from these professionals and help to design and construct systems that are more cost effective both in terms of capital and operating costs and efficiency.

Now what will be the best option in Barbados could very well be different from what is best in Kenya, Australia, the US or any where else in the world but someone like me and I presume Ryan can look at whats available locally and advise as to the best option for your situation.

There is a lot of information that is available for free on this forum but if you are truly serious about a commercial venture then you need to develop and put together a massive amount of information (like I did) or pay people who already have (Like I am as well). Rup most of all but other as well will point out for free many potential problems almost all of which are very real concerns and knowing about them is really valuable. While this information will guide you away from some pitfalls and will help you find your way by your self if you employ the right people to guide you, you will get there faster with less money.

I say all this not in the expectation that you will pay to fly me to Babados but rather to save you some time. 8 years ago when I got started there were not any credible AP professionals that I could find. Now there are a small handful that have demonstrated successes. Making use of their skills and knowledge will make you money.

To reinforce what I just said how can you be specifying your pump when you haven't designed your pipe network and hence do not know what your total dynamic head is.

Hi Stuart, I see your still around preaching the AP word, where is Steve? I have put some thought into this and think it would work, I am putting my ideas out there because if we don't then the comertial model will take longer to archive and be replycated, nun of us would be here if not for Joel and Steve aquamad Rupert etc.... those people shared there ideas that was a big help I want to share mines as well, I have a system going from 2005.

So the debate of if shipping containers are cost effective is undesided at this time. The only changes I want to make to the 40's are to drill the 8in holes through the floor. All pipes are run in a straight line with two elbows at each end to connect to stand pipe. The resistance of 2 elbows per line is negilable and the head of such a system is very small, in theory it can be as low as 1in.

The system design is simple but very effective it takes a while to grasp the concept but when you get it you can start to see the saving you can get with such a system.

Alot of insperation comes from this guy.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxE_9bXR ... ata_player

Nice setup... but not cheap...