I’ve been working a lot of hours on the weekend and after work and we’re finally almost ready to fill everything up with water and get the conditioning process started.
What we finished
Electrical
We finished all the electrical upstairs and down wth all the circuits hooked into the panel. It’s so nice not to have to run extension cords everywhere and have all our fans and lights working. We even have all the outlets working in the dome. We still have to hook up the grow lights once we actually get the time to sit down and figure out our needs, but that’s not a high priority now during the summer. We do have the circuit for the grow lights all hooked up to the switch boxes, we just need to install them at some point.
As you can see in the last picture, some of our junction boxes have already warped due to the heat on hot days. That said, with the exhaust fan running we stay within 6 or 7 degrees of the outside temp, so our ventilation is performing better than expected. We’ll see the temp come down a few degrees as well once the plants are growing to give us a bit of evaporative cooling.
Grow beds insulated
All the grow beds are insulated with 1 inch foam to prevent condensation on the wood and help stabilize the water temperature.
Water tank mounted
We completed our platform for the water tank to give us a little bit more elevation to gravity feed through our filters and into the sump where we can pump it upstairs. We also covered the floor in some roll stock to give it a little bit more water resistance and trimmed it out. I’m getting increasingly apprehensive about how much water we have with all the wood, but I’m confident that everything will at least have ample time to dry out when it does get wet.
What’s left?
Really all that’s left is installing all the plumbing and the pond liner in the beds. I have the liner, the water pumps, air pump, and filter media. The only thing I’m still waiting on is for my clarifier to be fabricated, but we can start without it. The mineralizer can be a stand in clarifier for the low waste load of the minnows that we’re going to use to season the system.
Here’s hoping my next post will be about the system filled with water!