2013: Not So Digital Backyard Aquaponics Project

0:02 Hello, This is Rob Greenlee. This is the first episode of my Digital Life podcast off of Rob Greenley dot com. And I just wanted to say hi to everybody and thank you for downloading this from Rob Greenley dot com. I'm gonna post this to a variety of places online, and it's just kind of my own personal journal of things that I'm up to and things that I might find interesting that I want to share with anybody who wants to subscribe to this. But and if you wanted to give me any kind of feedback, you can certainly send me an email to Rob at Rob Greenlee dot com.

0:53 And if you have any ideas on things that I should explore or whatever in this audio podcast, then give me a buzz in my email address and I'll be happy to see what I can do to to expand on maybe that idea or that topic. But what I wanted to mention to you today was I'm on this journey that I've started here. Actually it started last summer to build an aquaponics system in my backyard, and uh, it's it's been a it's been a journey. I'm actually out here standing in it right now. It's not exactly making a lot of noise right now because it's not totally fired up. And I'll post some pictures to my blog about this thing. Actually, I've I've posted things to my Facebook account about my project. But I've I've spent the last year or so being a student of acaponics and I'm actually standing inside of my greenhouse right now.

1:58 And it's it's basically a project in process, and it's not exactly something that can I say this I've finished. It's kind of in in process. I basically built a kind of like a home backyard greenhouse. It actually came as a kit and it's a six foot by eight foot in size, and I've gone through some training on acoponics. I don't know if you know what acaponics is, but it's basically growing lettuce and produce and vegetables in beds of water so there's no soil involved. And uh. And what I've done is I've I've built an old, my old custom system here and it's it can be a little frustrating to actually work on. I've I've struggled with it.

2:52 All of the tanks are are all custom built and actually built from plywood, and that they have like pond liners in them and plumbing that that runs the water through the system. The d acoponics the foundation acoponics is basically growing produce based on fish waste. So you basically have a fish tank that funnels water through various types of growing medium where it's like these little clay balls or whatever. And then I also have what's called deep water rafts, which is basically just a bed of water that has a foam foam panel that that kind of sits on top and sorry about I got an airplane flying over right now. And then the plant's roots actually dangle into the water, so you basically circulate the water through all of these tanks and grow beds, and basically the roots just you know, suck nutrients from the soil.

4:02 So actually, in the middle of building this, and it was just a pet project that I started working on. I flew down to Denver, Colorado about it about a year ago or so and and went through a pretty extensive training training program to to learn how to build an acaponics system. And it can be a complex and difficult thing to actually do. It's not as as easy as it sounds. You have to be an expert in a lot of different areas and and so I've been slowly learning and and uh, it's difficult to grow acoponics up in the Northwest where it's so cold and then dark in the winter months. But I've I've forged ahead and built one myself. It's kind of funny they've the further I dive into it, the more I I realized that that it's it's not as easy to do. Like I said, here in the Northwest, there's not as much sunlight and dealing with moisture and and rain and all these factors come into play. And I unfortunately I bought a greenhouse that doesn't have insulated panels, and so I have a real issue with the greenhouse and kind of leakage of warmth and heat. So I'm I'm actually in

5:32 the greenhouse right now, and it's kind of warm in here, but and it's you know, it's overcasts, so there's there's definitely radiant energy coming in here. But the greenhouse has so many air holes in it that it doesn't really it doesn't really hold the heat in it as well as it probably needs to. But but I'm enjoying working on it. It's it's basically a brain tease and hopefully I can ended up and running here over the next couple of weeks, and I'll, like I said, I'll post some pictures of the progress that I'm making on this. I've invested quite a bit of money into it already. I've got I got power plugged into actually had an electrician come out and actually run power into the greenhouse.

6:20 And I've got two significant circuits in here because I have very high powered lights that are hanging from the greenhouse, so in the darker, cooler months, I can have basically one hundred and twenty watts of lights or one hundred one two hundred watts of lights in here during the winter months to keep things warm and keep things growing. So it's it's exciting, but you I want to bore everybody to death here with my rant on aquaponics. But I will definitely keep you up to date. If you have an interest in hearing about certain aspects of what I built and about aquaponics, I just would do a search in in Bing or Google on the term aquaponics, and there's just a plethora of information out there if you want to look at maybe building your own home backyard system to grow your own produce, but it it does take some investment. And but there are some kind of simple startup systems that you can buy from from companies.

7:34 There's one that's called the acoponicssource dot com and that's that's a good resource if you want to join a forum and talk about, you know, a system that you might want to build and learn from others. So I would definitely go do that. But I wanted to sign off from the first episode of the Rob Greenley My Digital Life podcast and go check out my website. I'll keep it up to date. Actually, I post on my website, probably mostly about podcasting, and I'll do that as well, but I'll ever so often I'll venture into other areas and hobbies and if I go to an event or something like that that is of interest, I'll definitely post it here as part of my audio podcast. So, like I said, thank you for downloading this. This is definitely an experiment, and shoot me an email Rob at Rob Greenley dot com and I would love to hear from you, and thank you so much for listening to this and downloading it. Take care, Bye bye