Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

yes... nothing hindering the free flow of ideas here!!

Very very interesting Bullwinkle, so lemme see if I got this straight, you get some clay soil, mix it with goats poo, the little balls they poop out, add water, then let it all try in the sun. Once its dry you bake it as hot as you can and then its done. You can use any organic material other than goat poo, like coconut husk chips or the like...?

Also ROFL@ 'When the yelling stops its dry' God bless Mrs. Bullwinkle, lucky man you are

Instead of goat/Sheep poo you could use fine saw dust
Could save the house from smelling like a sheep pen and may save a marriage

I guess you COULD use sawdust, but then if you go in that direction, I may as well stop burning the rancid yak fat and diesel oil romantic bath candles I make

Had to check there for a moment Bullwinkle.... thought you must have been down in Tassie...

Couldn't decide whether you were a treecutter... or a treehugger...

A bit of both really

I prefer to cut my trees into a more huggable size, and then hug them

were you inviting Bear Grylls over for dinner?

I found this while doing a search on google for how expanded clay balls are made.

viewtopic.php?f=35&t=4563

its a thread on media making

as is this

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=499&start=15&hilit=clay

Basically it turns out I wasnt as original as I thought

And that previous link wasn't to a patent for goat dung scoria, but tells the story of how the expanded clay balls are made.

You want the stuff that comes out of the goats BEFORE it even goes into the goat. Snag a bale of hay. Buy and old blender at a yard sale. Put hay in the blender and let it run until you get some fairly small particle. Smelly portion of the problem solved.

You could make the clay balls by hand - invite friends over for a barbeque - and have everyone help. Set them in the sun to dry as much as possible so they do not stick together and then put high heat on them.

Maybe a cheap way to heat a kiln would be with a parabolic antenna concentrating the sun down on a small opening at the top of your kiln. You would have to experiment. You probably don't want rapid heating, even with very dry clay.

The original concept was to test something that could be made in developing nations that wouldn't burn something that people animals could eat, but rather something that's a waste product.

In hindsight, the goat dung probably isn't a waste product, because anyone with an agricultural bent is probably going to want all the dung they can get for fertiliser.

Sawdust mighty be a better option.

In a slightly odd turn of events, I found myself needing to point someone to this post and found a google search for "home made goat dung scoria"...

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off& ... QYQ4dUDCA0

now gets two hits.

One is this this tread, and the other is some kind of industrial machinery site that makes stuff into balls

I hope they also read all the other info on BYAP on this topic. Goat dung stinks when you burn it

You never cease to amaze me! So you actually made it!!!!

How did it hold up in water??

Never tested.

It was just a thing in my head that needed to be expunged

The only reason I revisited it today was because I needed to point someone at the post.

But it was so low fired that I'm guessing it would have decomposed in that way that a poor quality terracotta pot will eventually.

You can probably tell from the pic that it's too low fired. At around 800C, you shouldn't see any of whatever that light stuff is in the pic, so I doubt it got anywhere near that, but the ceramic change kicks in at around 650C and it definitely got to that, so it would never really decompose back to clay, but would have been a little brittle for every day use.

Even at the temperatures you see inside a loungeroom heater, you can feel it's not about to turn back into clay ever again.

If fired to proper temperature (say in a big stack of wood outside), it would still have exactly the same structure, be more chemically stable, and would last for a few thousand years at least.

The result I had would work, but after digging around in it for a few years in a growbed, you would definitely find a stack of brick dust in the bottom of your growbed. Another 100C or so would be a very different story as far as longevity is concerned.

But water itself would never change it chemically, even at my home heater temperatures.