41–50 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, this is a cool project and I’m sure the person had a lot of fun which some people are apparently allergic to.
It's just not very interesting as a whole. A quant and his programmer gf living in ny stack 3 fishtanks in a rack. It's questionable why it's even on here at all.
I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project. But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home. This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentuc…
Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense. Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Structural support in the floor? There are people that weigh more than this. It’s only 20 gallons
But big tanks do need extra support. This is a relevant thing to post in case someone is thinking about scaling it up. The Pfizer building in NYC almost collapsed after they tried to build a swimming pool on the roof. This happens semi-regularly when building owners ignore, or don't consult, engineers about rooftop swimming pools. Every owner wants one and doesn't want to be told no.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense. Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.…
Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.
If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.
> in our one-bedroom NYC apartment ... Bigger tank = better If tank fails, you are liable for water damages and home insurance DOES NOT cover that. We were flodded by neighbours, the damage was $20.000 in cheap east europe commie block. Plus bigger tanks need structural support in floor (steel beams).
Having a fish tank for fish is a normal enough thing and carries similar risks of water damage, doesn't it? Does this strike you as significantly higher-risk, less insurable, or more irresponsible than that?
Cool project. I wonder how large a tank you need to get room fle aquatic animals you would actually eat. And as a small aside, idk how one can write sentences like this and not immediately revolt and switch to metric: Since a gallon of fresh water weighs roughly 8.34lbs, we estimate this puts the entire weight of the system’s water somewhere between 170 and 250lbs.
As a scientist and an adult immigrant to the US, I came to appreciate both systems as useful for different objectives.
Celsius/Metric is neatly rooted in science - where it truly shines by removing /most/ of the conversion factors (but does it? we still have, today, speed of light that should be 1, Avogadro and Boltzmann constants are just odd numbers you memorize too) - but doesn't match neither everyday weather and life (0F being "coldest you'll experience in a place humans commonly live" and 100F being "hotest", and close to wet bulb temperature and, through a fluke of an undiagnosed fever of Fahrenheits' wife, nice threshold for fever).
Fahrenheit/Imperial is actually relatively convenient to machining, industry and agriculture (but not engineering or science) - how much of that is actually fractional measurements (1/16th makes a ton more sense than 0.0625), and how much are the "fingertip/decent meal/daily water intake/sustains a person" idea of an inch/lb/gal/acre.. is quite intuitive. Far more so for composite units. 1 PSI is intuitive - you know what force to exert at what area of a piston, same for torque'ing to 80 lbs-ft.
But.. it makes a ton less sense when you separate N from kg (yeah, I am a physicist, I know why, it just makes less sense when building stuff in a dirty corner of an industrial revolution), then somehow apply it to a whole square meter to get a Pascal, and now you need decimal fractions of a million of those.. to represent what you actually see. Quick, do you think you can plug a 2cm diameter garden hose at 0.5MPa with your thumb to spray your dog?
CGS system was quite popular and useful, IMHO for that reason, at the time when Europe was actually manufacturing stuff and inventing them in barns and factories. But it was essentially "neither" - bastardization of sacred kg and meter - lost to SI.
US keeps inventing and making stuff in garages and fields.. and it shows in its devotion to imperial system. But I can see convincing mechanics to 1/8th of a cm and 40g way before I can see them taking up 1.25 mm and 0.04 kg.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense. Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.…
Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.
I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project. But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home. This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentuc…
The point is that it's fun and you learn something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense. Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.…
Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.