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Group: Moderators
Last Login: 11/4/2009 7:08:25 PM
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check your local utilities websites bro... ours (in Pittsburgh) have online tools that allow you to toggle your various appliances (furnace, fridge, washer, drier, AC) with each running on gas vs electric to help you figure out with local ambient temps and local utility costs... how much it will cost to run any given item a certain way.
This utility on my Electric COs website convinced me to stick with natural gas for my furnace and drier! Kudos to the Electric Co for the service.
What is your electricity cost bro? Ours is 16 cents per kw hr and its still cheaper for us to use natural gas to heat the greenhouses, fishrooms, etc.
.Anthony Calfo
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Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 6/15/2009 10:00:48 PM
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Funny you say that Tuna. I was thinking the same thing today. Who needs sleep anyway  My kinds already love helping me make frag plugs and boxes. They are only 4 and 5 years old, so hopefully I can get them chopping corals in a few years Thanks Anthony, As far as cost effectiveness goes, natural gas is definately the best option, but my only choices are oil and propane. Electric will cost way more. We scrapped the forced hot air unit since the costs were way to high and im sure it wont last long if it has all that humid salty air going through it. I am now leaning towards using a modine 175,000 BTU propane heater as the main source of heat. We alreasy installed dedicated electrical circuits for electric heaters, so we may just use them this year and see how it works. Im fairly sure the radiant system with the tubing run into the sump would be much more cost effective, but im not sure if its worth the $6000 its gonna cost to buy the equipment. At the old farm the highest electrical costs we had were in the winter time due to the heaters. The basement gets down to the mid 50's so raising the temps 20-25 degrees takes alot of wattage. If I can keep the room temps around 70 I dont think it will be so bad to heat it up a bit more with the electrical heaters. If it doesnt work out I can easily install the radiant system next year. Im really hoping to delay the move a bit longer so I can run the new systems in the dead of winter without risking my mother colonies. Im actually more worried about the summer temps. Having to heat it a bit more only costs more money, where cooliing can turn into a nightmare. We are going to seal up the garage doors from the outside about half way up with removable walls. The top will be window screen, so in the summer we can open the garage doors and have 2, 4'x10' openings to draw air into the farm. I having decided on fan size yet, but im thinking somewhere in the 4000-6000 cfm range. Im also going to use 2 circulation fans on the cieling with about 1200-2000 cfm each. The basement at the old place never got over 70 degrees in the summer so I never had to deal with heat. I hope airflow alone will be enough .
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Group: Forum Members
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Its been quite a while since I updated this thread. The last few weeks have mostly been spent working on the structure itself, but we finally started bulding tanks this week. We origionally were going to use the plastic pallet type tanks, but decided that building our own out of plywwod would be better. I found a nice epoxy resin to seal the tanks with made by MAS epoxies. Its a bit more expensive than some of the other brands I found, but it seems to be highly endorsed for its quality and strength by boaters. Hopefully we will be able to do some experimentation with it next week. If anyone has any experience with epoxy and plywood, I'm all ears. I plan on using wood flour to thiken the epoxy and fill in the seams with it. Then I wanted to use fiberglass strips to reinforce and strengthen them. Painting them is another issue. Some people recommend tinting the epoxy itself and others recommend painting the surface after sealing it with epoxy and then adding another coat or 2 on top of that. Here's some pics of the tanks. Some of the legs and blocks are only temporary, we just wanted to set everything up to make sure it will all fit together properly. 
This last one shows the platform we built above the tanks for the surge devices. Not sure if it will work or not, but I will also have each one of the tanks surge into the one below it. 
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Last Login: 2/20/2008 6:56:53 PM
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Looks awesome!
You may want to check out this forum:
http://fingerlakesreef.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=13
There's some folks with lots of plywood experience.
Scott
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do consider adding horizontal perpendicular cross bracing (glued and mitered corners... and tied with lag screws if not bolts (better))... a tremendous source of easy and inexpensive reinforcement (like "ribs"). At present... your models are engineered to take the brunt of bowing stress on the top and bottom braces. This is a huge stress in the corners. Without the aforementioned bracing, you will likely need a four-sided capture (metal... riveted aluminum or welded steel (better))
.Anthony Calfo
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| Thanks Scott, Great link. Anthony, The corners are double and triple braced in most spots. Plywood on the inside and outside will also help strengthn the structure. I basically doubled the reinforcement that I used on ym other plywood tanks, so im absolutely sure it will hold without a problem. The actual water depthi in the tanks is not going to exceed 18" so its not that bad.
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Last Login: 2/23/2008 5:56:45 PM
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Hi -
I'm almost complete with my own plywood/epoxy tanks -
For you - if this is a coral farm why bother tinting/painting the epoxy at all? Over time anyway I assume you'll have some coraline algae growth anyway. If you do want to anyhow - I would use an epoxy tinting agent. I'm not sure what kind of paint you can get to stick to the epoxy, so I definitely don't recommend epoxy/paint/epoxy top coat. Maybe some of the Krylon Fusion? - My personal opinion is to tint the epoxy if you want to go that route, or some sort of epoxy additive.
As for seams, I bonded all my wood pieces together with Gorilla glue, and then ran a small bead along each seam. It's waterproof and foams up and fills nicely and can be sanded down (albeit not easily). I liked the wood flour and epoxy idea, but if you're going to to lay fiberglass over, then I don't think I'd bother. The fiberglass is hard to lay and epoxy into (sharp) corners, so I had experimented with a few filleting ideas (urethane spray foam sanded down to make a 45 degree transition). Pure chopped strand fiberglass (not in mat form) would probably be ideal, but as far as I know that process is out for non-production line uses. My final outcome (for myself msotly) is to use mat as much as possible, and strips of fiberglass to work around all the edges.
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Group: Forum Members
Last Login: 2/23/2008 5:56:45 PM
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Oh - in that last pic - the setup with all the multi-level tanks looks really cool - I'd love to see a display setup like that sometime. But please tell me that you don't intend on keeping things perched atop buckets when it's all in use though... right?
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Group: Forum Members
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| Thanks for the tips Doug, Buckets are only temporary. We just wanted to get some rough estimates on finished dimensions. I figured the wood flour would be enough, but we have just been double reinforcing everything we have made so far and I just want to make sure this thing is as sealed as possible. There's alot at stake here and I hate to start springing leaks when my mother colonies are in there How did you soak the plywood before you epoxied it? Do you do it with the eopxy itself or with some kind of primer?
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Group: Forum Members
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I didnt prime or anything like that. I wanted the epoxy to bond to the plywood, and I had concerns about a skin layer of paint peeling away - basically just epoxy bonding to paint and thats it. So I put down a skim coat of epoxy direct onto the plywood and then used that to stick the fioberglass mat into so it would hold. I have a few post fiberglass epoxy coats until it looked reasonably glossy all around. Mind you, thats what I've done so far, I havent yet water tested mine yet either. I didnt have any problems with wood warpage from epoxy soaking in...
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