Any way to predict aquaponics impact on basement humidity?
Hey guys, I need some help from my smarter friends.
Is there any way to crunch some numbers and calculate what kind of impact a small aquaponics project would be on my basement humidity?
My 7th grader wants to do an aquaponics system for his 4H/FFA project. The project needs to be finished by March, which means we can’t set it up outside and the garage would not be much better. I have plenty of space in the basement, but we have a very tight house and I worry about humidity buildup. However, the basement is large and the project will be small, so the humidity impact may be minimal. I have a couple of dehumidifiers that I could run to help dry things out, but that runs a lot of electricity that I would like to avoid.
Is there a way to take the total cubic feet of the space and determine what the humidity increase would be for, say a certain percentage of evaporation off of a certain number of gallons?
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Do you have a downstairs bathroom where you could set this up and run the bath fan 24/7?
Unfortunately, no. The basement is unfinished, just used for storage.
Clay,
If it's a small project that will be wrapped up by March, I wouldn't worry.
I agree with Martin, there's not much to worry about. But as a thought experiment, here's how I would ballpark the impact. Once the project is up and running, you should know how much water you need to add to it daily. If you wanted the project to have zero impact on your total moisture levels, you would need to remove exactly that amount of moisture.
If you do that using the dehumidifer, you could estimate the energy costs using the dehumidifer's Energy Factor (liters per kWh). If you are adding 2L of water to the project per day and running an Energy Star dehumidifier with an EF of 2, you are using an extra kWh (~$0.10 in my area) per day. Dehumidifier performance is dependent on temperature and relative humidity, so real world results may vary. The dehumidifer energy ends up as heat in the basement, so it will result in a slight decrease in energy used by the heating system.
In practice, you would only need to run the dehumidiifer if humidity rose to problem levels (also climate and house dependent. At above 40% indoor winter RH in my climate of Upstate NY, you start to see window condensation and other problems). If the indoor humidity stays below this (and you can measure with a cheap thermo-hygrometer), then there's no need to run the dehumidifier at all.