We have been trialing a technique that is used by gardeners all around the world and applied it to our little raft system at home. In our case we have taken a few short cuts to speed up the process of nutrient break down in our mineralization tank and have found some interesting things of note about energy consumption.
Our little experimental system is basically a continuous run of a floating raft bed that is just over 20 meters or 65 feet and 600 mm wide. This gives us a growing area of 12 square meters. The raft bed has no dedicated aeration, though does have a home made venturi that runs on the circulation of the raft water for half an hour, twice a day.