Jason Warren

I do not receive access information to download the four OLD rocket mass heater DVDs AND world domination gardening dvds. I received a blank email on saturday titled: your early version of the older rocket mass heater DVDs. It's important I can download these, as I originally paid to watch them on vimeo and they lag too much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you Wayne for responding. I'll check into it, thank you.

Hi Everyone,

I'm in WV and winters can get below zero for a few days at a time and then cycle back to 40s and 50s the next week.

I'm building a pole barn style rabbit / duck coop 12 ' up hill behind my aquaponics greenhouse. Greenhouse is 48 x 24. Pole Barn is 38 x 16. Buildings run east to west. I want to build a huge solar hot water collector to keep my 4000 gallon aquaponics system warm through winter.

My south roof will be angled 45 deg to the south and have a surface area of 38 x 6. I'm thinking of installing black metal roofing sideways, building headers from wall to peak at both ends, running Pex lines horizontal on the metal roofing, and capping the metal roofing with duel wall solexx (left over from greenhouse) or poly (buy new)

Some of my questions:
1. What material and design should I build my headers from. I'm thinking I need 2" pipe for my headers with 3/4" Pex running the 38' length of the roof.
2. What type of connectors should I use.
3. Do I have to strap my pex tightly to the metal roof or can they just lay there? Should I place them under the metal on the plywood, or perhaps sandwich them between two sheets of metal for tighter contact and even heat.
4. Will pex stretch and not break if water is in the lines and freezes?
5. I hope to build the headers so they drain back to the system, but just in case, what header options do I have that can take freezing?

I look forward to hearing anyone's ideas or design options.

Thank you,
Jason

Thank you Kacy for sharing your story. It helped me with my design. I'm planning a 3 tier system: Rabbits, Worm Bin, & Duckweed tank. My thoughts are that the rabbit poo and urine will drop into large worm bins. The bins will have a drainage at the bottom that will then flow down a tube to the duckweed tanks. I can hose down the worm bins as needed to wash nutrients down into the duckweed tank or just neutralize the rabbit urnie. This whole setup would be in my greenhouse. I heard that ammonia is a problem with keeping rabbits in the greenhouse, I'm trying to devise a way to deal with the waste in a way that works in conjunction with my greenhouse.

I appreciate any thoughts from you or anyone else reading this post.

Best Regards,
Jason

Zach,

Thank you for a vote of confidence. This is the first time I've done any building project like this so I'm nervous. Seeing the brittleness I just get scared the whole thing is going to topple in a good storm.

I like your idea for leaving it unpainted. What do you think about some tung oil down the road?

I also have a few spots where the wood looks rotten or that it was rotten at one time or had bugs at one time. Soft spots with pits in it. We tried to weed it all out, but my helpers put up a 2x12 beam with a rough spot. How should I treat that?

Best Regards,
Jason

P.S. All wood was rough cut green when I got it. You can see a little dark patch in the 2x12 on the top picture. That area is soft. I could dig it out with a claw hammer if I so desired. Not sure what causes those.

John,

I don't have data yet. Just sort of pre-planning. I'm using a concrete mass for the tanks and north wall, they are in contact with each other. Plus my greenhouse is pretty well insulated. low e glass on west and east, solexx on south.

I'll have to wait and see what it does. Sort of a mess right now, but I hope to have it all painted, the windows in this next week, the grow bed filled, and the tanks start filling.

Thank you,
Jason

Thank you Dale and John for your insight.

I have a 1100 sq ft solar greenhouse under construction with 3 x 1000 gallon fish tanks. I'll need to aerate the fish tanks, and I'll be cycling water through my grow beds. It seems a waste to electrically heat my fish tanks and then vent hot air out of the structure. I'm brainstorming ways to transfer the daytime heat into the water.

I'm already building a sub terrain heating and cooling system where in the heat of the day I pump some of the air through one large grow bed to extract heat and humidity into the grow bed media. Since I'm already cycling water and cycling air when its hot, I'm wondering if I can reclaim a radiator, cycle the aquaponics through the radiator and place that radiator inline with the intake duct work of my sub terrain heating system. It seems the radiator would start to cool the air flowing through it and might even condense and reclaim some of the humidity. A regular radiator or air duct heat exchanger might get clogged, maybe 50' of black 3/4 line in an air pendulum would be better.

My understanding is that any method of cycling water and air and using heat exchange is more energy efficient then creating heat. Pumps and fans range between 40 and 120 watts while heaters are around 1100 watts.

Best Regards,
Jason

Does anyone have an aeration system that helps heat or cool their fish water depending on where the supply air is coming from and how hot it is?

Thank you,
Jason

An update for anyone coming across this thread. I would not recommend Cypress. I'm not sure why, but it seems brittle to me. When you cut off a small piece it will dry out considerably and you can snap it into little pieces. I hope my beams and rafters don't have issues down the road. I think I might have gone with a pine structure and then painted the heck out of it. But atlas, we'll see.