Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey everybody,
I live in a place with very dry climate, we get Extreme heat in summer and freezing Cold without snow.
I have a Greenhouse with an active system in it but the cost of green houses is insane in my region and most of the time not air tight or thermally efficient. Need help in my idea, making grow beds outside with no green house and just sealing the grow beds with small enclosed hoop Houses and focusing only on Heating the water to heat up the Each individual Grow bed, Should this be enough to keep the temperate for the plants? Heating With propane or wood is quite useless in bigger green houses as it barley keeps the temp about 8 Celsius higher then it is out side.
Would the radiating heat of the water be enough to keep the plants alive at Temperatures around -10?

I've been doing some research about heating water for my fishtank. Think I might try something using a scaled down version of heating water with compost. Dont know how much space you have to devote to such a system, but it's a place to start looking and let your imagination work a little to adapt such a system to your circumstances.
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https://waldenlabs.com/compost-water-he ... jean-pain/

I usually have plants overwinter but not all types of plants. This happens even with ice or snow on the media beds. Usually gets to around -7C here but not often. Plants aren't actively growing here in the winter because of low light levels and short day lengths so a bit different than where you are.

How long a period (overnight, days, weeks, months) are you having to keep the temperature up and how high? Sunny or cloudy conditions? Any particular type of plants? Some plants respond well to bottom heat others not as much. Any particular growing system in mind (media beds, rafts...)?

I should point out that airtight is bad when growing plants the plants need fresh air just like us. That's always been an issue with greenhouses - how to keep the heat in and still give the plants enough fresh air.

Another issue you might run into is condensation from the warm moist air cooling against the cooler plastic of the hoop houses and dripping cold water down on the plants - air movement helps stop this.

Hope this helps.

I live at 7500 feet or 2500m altitude, in the winter -20C is quiet normal for nights. During the day my greenhouse gets to 30C, even at -15 outside. for nights I use a little portable propane heater. It can handle night temps to around -25C, to prevent any frost. Dirt temp in the gh is never lower than 5C, no foundation.
The plants hibernate, because the days are to short. End of Jan, they start to kick in. Mostly I plant potatoes end of December, it takes 4 weeks instead of 2 weeks for the first green to show up, very slow plant grow, with huge leaves. End of April, or first week of May I can harvest.
Very tasty potatoes.
This year I had one of those polar bombs with close to -30, got some frost damage. I think no problem to keep fishwater warm, but without grow lights 12h a day nothing will really grow.