Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Re heating of tanks
Look at this pix. It is Karels idea. (Roskar) He got one of his mates to make up the heating grid out od 25mm copper.
Today I am glassing it onto the bottom of his tank I made fro him. It is having 50mm sheet of polyurethane foam over the top of it and then two layers of glass, then flow coat.
Karel is going to pump hot water through the heating grid thereby making an effective "underfloor" heating system for his tank.

Muzza

Very nice muzza, is that 7/8 or 3/4 pipe ?

Is heat transer expected to be acceptable thoguh the fibreglass?

Going back to climate zone fish for the interum.

It is 25mm Steve, evidently he has a "frigie" mate who dod it for him. FG is a bit of an insulator in it's own right so I guess we will see how good it really is, but I feel it will work well. You don't need much heat coming up through the floor of the tank to make that difference, and being 2300 ltr volume tank, once the water is warm it won't take much to keep it that way, I would think.

Mojo

Excellent work guys. Will eagerly await results. This solves the whole issue of leaching during solar heating and also enables use of copper. As has been said - the issue is going to be whether there is effective heat transfer.

Wow, what a great idea, and so neat too! great work there! I look forward to hearing how well it works!

how flexable is FG?... thinking that if you could put a 'thin' coat over copper pipes we could get around the whole copper pipe problem... but I would not want it cracking on me...
Oh yes, how much heat can it take?

Thanks Murray for posting that one.

I guess for results we will haev to wait till some time next year. It has just started to warm up nicely around here, so probably don't need heating in a hurry. Have other priorities to attend to first, such as getting this tank of the trailer, in it's spot and filled up ready for fish tomorrow.

And then work on the next three growbeds, so far only one ready yet, and not even piped up yet. After all that I might run the line to the solar hot water unit on the roof to tap into the hot water source.

Karel

I was trying to organise solar heating for my tank, went to the plumbers supplies to get some hot water black pipe (reaul?sp) but the guy said he wasn't sure that it wouldn't break down in direct sunlight. Have a phone number to call so if I find out a definitive answer, I will let all know.