Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

A couple of years ago I bought 5l of 50% KOH solution, but when that ran out I bought 5kg of flakes, which would last much longer, except that I'll be using it faster with many more fish this time. A local chemical supplier has it, and it's not too expensive. I dont think I can post you any, it's probably illegal to send it through the postal system, and courier is too expensive, so just look for a local chemical supplier. I just throw 10 or 20g of flakes into the sump, so it is well mixed and passed through the GBs before the fish encounter it.

Thanks Gordon, I have just put in an email enquiry with a chemical supplier in the SE Melbourne for KOH flakes. Failing that, I will talk with my local water industry contacts...

Photo time

I squeezed in a punnet each of celery, bok choy and white violas (to deter cabbage butterflies) to try and sop up my excess nitrates. Also bucketed out a couple 100 litres onto the garden and topped up with rain water. Will have to add a bit more salt to make up for the dilution, and keep an eye on the pH.

More photos

Looking good! I'm also working on my Raspberry Pi project. Hopefully I'll be posting about that tonight or tomorrow.

Joc, how many grams of feed are you putting into the system each day now? Also what is the surface area of GBs? I guess the towers would be equivalent to a couple of square meters, but maybe you can come up with a better estimate of how much space all the vertical plants would take up on a flat surface? Just trying to figure out why your NO3 is so high.

Also, I'm wondering how much extra water temperature fluctuation you are getting because of the towers, which have a lot of surface area for their volume, so are going to act as good heat exchangers. Could you measure water temp at say 8am and 4pm and report back, along with max and min air temps for the day (BOM will do) please?

Hey Gordon, I have 20 towers with 8 plants each, and currently have all but one planted, so 152 plants. At their current spacing they cover 5 square metres. I reckon that would fill at least 2 IBC GBs depending on spacing. As you can see from the photos, I have a lot of plants in my IBC GB and 1/2 barrel GB, but growth has slowed with the cooler weather of the last few weeks. (I am currently in the shed with the fire going listening to the wind try to lift the roof! Tomorrow, the forecast is snow down to 600m and this is supposed to be the Victorian Riviera with beautiful mild autumnal days with no wind!!).

I am feeding around 60g of skrettings large sinking pellets a day which usually don't reach the bottom, or if they do, they don't last more than 2 minutes. My ammonia and nitrites are 0-0.25ppm. Just adjusted the pH back up to 6.8 over the past couple of days.

I don't have a thermometer yet, but I can vouch that the FT water is very cold now in the mornings so the towers are good heat exchangers which will cause my water temperature to diurnally fluctuate quite a bit. My OH is setting up monitoring with a RP to measure temp in the FT, the tower collection pipe, and air. It will be very interesting to see how it varies - quite a lot I expect, which will be an issue in the spring with large trout, although at the rate they are growing I might be eating trout in late winter. In fact if I caught some of the larger ones now in a river, they would go in the pan . I will post graphs as soon as they are available. Local max and min temperatures for May are here http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/IDCJD ... test.shtml

Mattyoga also has issues with high nitrates and has more GBs than me and possibly less fish. Maybe I just have too many fish that are eating too much, and not enough plants, or plants that aren't growing fast enough at the moment. A lot of folks say that they don't get fantastic growth in their first season probably due to deficiencies that are rectified as the system matures. Every couple of weeks I was adding a cap of liquid seaweed and a scoop of iron chelates when leaves were yellowing, but have stopped that now that I am feeding trout with good quality food (thanks Mr D). In the early days I also added some sulfate of potash when my seedlings were crisping around the edges. Calcium and magnesium have been taken care of with dolomite, and there's potassium in woodash lye too. Phosphorus may be an issue if not enough is coming from the fish food, although the is some P in the lye as well. I have salted to 1ppt, but that gets progressively diluted with top ups of tankwater (rain from colourbond roof).

Okay, that was a bit of an essay

Indeed they do, but I have no idea why that might be, I had fantastic growth from the start in my 1st system, such as this at 10 weeks, in winter: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=16345&start=150#p402124 .

Nothing to do with AP - just thrilled to finish my first wirework fairy tonight , inspired by Robin Wight's fantasywire fairy sculptures in the UK http://www.fantasywire.co.uk/

She needs a name - any ideas

She would stand about 50cm (18") tall with an extraordinarily high BMI, has four toes on each foot and a venomous bite. She is made of a couple of metres of fencing wire, several metres of 2mm gal tie wire, 50 metres of 1.25mm gal tie wire, and 40 metres of 0.90mm gal tie wire. Her wings are metal flywire threaded with 0.7mm tie wire. Her heart is a rose quartz Avon River pebble and she is holding a glass orb from Murano, Italy.

That is awesome,congratulations........

Thanks Dasboot

Fantastic work . I think it looks more like a Naiad than a fairy because it looks like it's swimming. Naiad has a pretty appealing definition from mythology, considering you're doing AP as well so maybe this would work for a name.

Cheers

I like that Scotty. Trust an APer to see her as swimming , but she kind of does look like that especially from behind. I can now see wirework naiads on seahorses and seadragons...
Thanks so much Curious. I am chuffed at all the lovely comments.

Time for a quick retrospective... Its only been 3 1/2 months since I came up with the idea to build my system