Joshua Segatto

David Croucher wrote:Naturally, this happens in water from limestone rocks, where calcium and magnesium increase the pH, lime coats the pipe inside and metal take-up is minimal.  Do it yourself?  Add soil-conditioner slaked lime in small amounts to the water - most any farmer will have some.  Or throw some old mortar or concrete chunks into the tank.

Isn't limestone / concrete also a no no in aquaponics due to the effect it has on imbalancing the PH?

Can you put plants that grow under water into the system to oxygenate water as well as give smaller fish such as mosquito fish an area to live and hatch?

According to everywhere I read... Copper piping is a huge no no in Aquaponics due to it poisoning the fish and because aquaponics water is acidic and will corrode it as well... so that's not an option. But from what some of you are saying, Aluminum is just as bad... I'll have to figure something else out. Thanks for the replies! =)

Is there a metal that would be safe? While plastic piping would work (I've looked in to using like drip irrigation pipe which is super cheap), as Bryant pointed out, I don't think that the water would cool as quickly as if it were a metal pipe. Additonally, I don't think condensation would happen above ground either by using plastic pipe (point 1 of my original post)

I found the plans to basically create a condenser out of aluminum pipe by running the pipe under ground, then back up and coiled in a 55 gallon drum in order to serve multiple purposes... 1) Draw humidity out of the air and collect the water 2) cool the air to run to a green house 3) cool down the water in the aquaponics system

However I haven't been able to find a ton of information on using aluminum in an aquaponics system other than that it can corrode? Does anyone have any warnings or information on why I shouldn't add about 40 feet of aluminum piping that water would circulate through??

Amit, you can actually save a lot of money using $35 temperature controllers such as https://www.amazon.com/dp/B011296704/

I've been looking into making a cooler like this using an AC because a window AC unit uses less electricity than a compressor. The theory based on my research is to buy a unit that is more than what you'd really need... such as one designed to cool a 5000 sqft room but using it on a 500 sqft room (math not correct, just using an example) and it will be able to efficiently keep the room cool and not freeze up from being tricked into running colder than designed.