Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Only prob is that the energy involved is about 1/2 for wax than it is for water. That's what I found in my blood transport experiment. Coconut oil melts at 24 deg which was perfect for me but it melted quickly, not enough energy involved which made transport validations too short in time. I guess if you have enough of the wax that doesn't matter.

When i researched waxes I found a combo that would have worked. Unfortunately it was cheap as chips as it was an industry by-product but for to the volume we needed, we exceeded the by-product volume available. To manufacture the stuff alone was incredibly expensive.

Much better to add another layer of management to the project and then outsource anyway. Again tax payers money. Meh..

Salting apparently hasn't stopped all the Ich, this one exited the FT via the SLO, where it was slowly going backwards with the current, with just an occasional bit of forwards motion. It was "flashing" - going over on to its side and even upside down every now and then too, like in this photo when it was in an ice cream container.




Spots on top




I need to put a decent guard on the SLO intake, as a couple more trout have taken the fast ride to the sump in the past couple of days. They look healthy enough, and I haven't managed to catch them yet, as they are a bit too fast in the daytime. I'll leave them there for now in case they sustained any injuries, to give them a bit more healing time before trying to net them again.

11:15am FT pH 7.27, Salinity 2.86ppt, Nitrates ~120... after a partial water change and a bit of rain today. I'll remove some more nitrate rich water tomorrow and cart it over to the cherry trees, now that the citrus has had a good dose of nutrient. I've whacked in another 30 chard plants too, hopefully they will survive a transplant in a month or so when my new GBs should arrive.

It can take time for salt to get rid of Ich as it's only susceptable at certain free swimming life stages:
http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/ichthyophthirius

How long it takes the Ich to progress through these stages is temperature dependent.

I got some of this stuff from Bummings which works well for a guard.

Yes BIF, I'm intending to leave salinity near 3ppt for 4-5 weeks, since my water has been below 8C recently. Then I want to plant some strawberries!

What is that mesh made of Charlie?

No idea Guna. If your worried about toxins and such I think there is a plastic mesh made specifically for aquaculture/aquaria industries as Ive seen it on such websites. Im a bit of a vigilanti when it comes to these things so I prob shouldnt have recommended the Bummings version. Ive always run with the fact that if there is anything wrong with the components I use well the fish will be the first to tell me.

After a wet and mostly overcast week- it was only 6C at midday on the 26th, in thick cloud/fog until 2:30pm, the benefits of buried tanks are obvious. Salinity (secondary y-axis) is down a bit due to a partial water change, and about 30mm of rain during the week.



Looks a bit blurry due to having reduce the image size a fraction to 800 pixels, which caused parts of letters and numbers to vanish, so I had to blur it first.

Wheat sprouts in the fog a few days ago

I had a call from Polywatertanks (Central Coast, NSW) yesterday, and the good news is that they are making a tank delivery to Qld this week, and will be passing nearby here on Saturday on their way back, so I'll only need to drive 12km to meet them to collect my 4 new GBs
That will bring me up to 8 500litre GBs. Everything is growing very well in the 4 currently in use, but Nitrates are still high, so I'm keen to bring the new GBs online, and I have lots of chard seedlings ready to go in.

that's a good chunk of GB

I see you have rectangular grow beds @ 500L each.
Does that make them about 1.8mx1m of surface area 300mm deep?
Are they sold as a watering trough?

2 X 1m, 300mm deep + a 50mm extra lip, but the underside is tapered to make them close to 500l. There are pics on the Polywatertanks web site, they are sold as AP grow beds.

The trout have been feeding well recently, here's a short 10MB wmv movie of them having dinner this arvo.
http://gunagulla.com/organic/images/Vid ... 130702.wmv

Mine have turned the corner and are feeding well too gunna. Less fish= more food hey? Lol bring on Xmas and vodka soused trout- My favourite.

They are, or at least were originally listed as a sheep watering trough..... they became an AP grow bed at a later date...