Aquaponics System, Passive Solar Greenhouse build

[natethebrown]

Awesome work! I am sure it feels nice to start seeing some production from all of your hard work!

[pinballlooking]

Thanks it feels great to see tomatoes and lettuce growing in the middle of the winter and I am very happy with the greenhouse temp so far. I do want to see how the temp performs over more time.

[pinballlooking]

Yesterday was nice and sunny I only have two auto vents setup at this time. I watched the temp in the greenhouse and I watch for it to get to 100. Then I open the door. I won’t need to do this when I have more auto vents are running.
As much sun as we had yesterday normally we would go over 100 and stay there for a while.

But now that I have three rows of barrels it never went over 90 in the greenhouse. They were in there just soaking up the heat.

Here are the temps for last night the greenhouse never went below 52F.
No supplement heat other than the stored heat in barrels

[jeff5may]

This is a good indication that your heat store is working well. Think of it this way: you now have a 10 ton thermal battery bank at your disposal. This can be directly related to refrigeration units as well: you now have a 5 ton static heat load in the barrels and a somewhat dynamic 5 ton load in the flood beds and fish reservoir.

The ground contact and evaporation of water exposed to air make the aqua system less "heat tight", which can be leveraged pretty darn easily. It looks like you may already have this covered with insulation and sheer mass. If you need additional heating or cooling, a small heat exchanger could be attached to the fish reservoir.

[pinballlooking]

I have the back vents almost ready to install.

[pinballlooking]

I finished the three back vents and put them up. I still need to shim the hinges so they close tight.
I will insulate between the vents and put up some white metal to finish it off.



Last night was not as cold but the greenhouse lowest temp was 56 F

[pinballlooking]

I am starting to plan out the new grow beds. We want to put in strawberries so this will make the new bed design come in sooner than I was planning.

I think I am going to have a 4’ x 4’ bed with rock. like the one I already have. This will have constant water flow. This will drain to a 12’ x 4’ DWC deep water culture. (That is the floating foam bed)
Above the rock GB I am going to make strawberry towers.
The towers get this Matala Green Filter Pad



They will be modeled off this guy’s design.



Here are the plants my lettuce is growing and the other picture very small plant is romaine lettuce I planted last week.
My PH has been going up and this is not normal. I found out why a small fish had died and was in the back of the tank were I could not see it.

I put a table spoon of fresh lime juice in to help bring the PH down it has a PH of about 4

[MEMPHIS91]

Hey man, been following your thread just about everyday! Great job!
Be very careful of the grow towers. They only need a, dip.........dip.........dip........ of water, any more than that and the water flows onto the plants and out onto the floor. I have a massive problem in my greenhouse because of this. I have to CONSTANTLY unclog lines to keep the very slow flow just right or else I can loose 20 gallons of water a day. Just a word of caution. I used the gutter guard foam pieces. WORKS GREAT.

[pinballlooking]

Thanks for the input and the complements.
I was planning on putting the towers over a grow bed. But I might just build a couple to test them out.

I have been considering maybe going with PVC 4” NFT and attach it to the pallet racking. That might be a better way to go.




We would like to put in 50-75 strawberry plants. I know they can be a pain do you grow any strawberry plants?

[MEMPHIS91]

I like the PVC tunnel tube idea. I saw a guy doing the same with black roll pipe. Cheaper and easier to cut.

Yes sir right now have strawberries in full bloom! Also bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, butter nut squash, leaks, tree onions, and much more.





I also have them in the towers as well, as you can tell they are not doing as well, though I did just fight (AND WIN!!!) a white fly issue on the towers.