Hello sorry this is my first post but I need help.
I have been reading every thing I can on aquaponics for the past two week. The short of the story is our family income has been cut to 1/4 and we are now having to rely on welfare to try and keep some food on the table. I do not want to feed my kids the crap that we have to rely on from welfare. I have been scraping together every penny I can for the past 3 months and I think I have enough to start a decent size system. I have $500 to work with.
I will have to do the system indoors because I need year around production. I live in Iowa so winter is to harsh.
I have a very small basement and the largest concern with it is it is only 6 ft tall at the highest and about 5' 6" under the duct work of the furnace is this enough height? I was either going to use a 150 gal water trough for the fish tank or build my own with wood and a pond liner. I figured the build my own I could keep the height down a bit and make up the amount of water with length.
My other option is to put the system upstairs where I have a lot of room 3 rooms actually (old farm house) but I am very concerned with the weight. I would like to start in the area of 150 gal fish tank and by my ruff, unknowledgeable math I have come up with a system that can weigh around 3,600 pounds.
This seems excessive to have up stairs. Is this too heavy for upstairs or is my math wrong?
The other thing is lighting I thought about using T5 florescent do to the overall cost per month vs light output. I have a ton of questions and I know all the answers are on this forum already so please do not be offended but I need to feed my family and do not want to do it off of state aid. so getting all the answers in one place will just make it a faster process for me. Thank you for your knowledge and your help.