Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Glad you're still alive and kicking Bob! BTW Thank You for your service too!

Hi Bob:

I can tell you from experience that the doctors don't know everything about the causes of heart disease. At age 39 I went in for a routine test and had emergency triple by-pass the next morning. Keep in mind I was a picture of "perfect" health with no health flags (diabetes, high BP, etc.), AND I ran cross country in HS and continued being an avid runner until age 30 when the obligations of work forced me to pretty much quit. 10 years later they still don't know what happened, although I passed my most recent Nuclear Stress Test last week with flying colors.

Just keep on pressing forward and keep us updated once you get back to building your system.

Roy

Glad your doing okay Bob. The orange stuff was bad news...

Thanks to all of you for your support

Some old business-

Redbeard- yes our country did do away with smoking in the work place, and etc. Went out right away and bought some no smoking signs for the shop and horse barn. Heard some grumbling at first. Funny thing happened. He decided to quit smoking and been doing great.

Photos- thanks again to all. Here goes.

Black Spot.jpg
[img]Black%20Spot.jpg[/img]

oops!

Hear is a picture of black spot on fatheads.

Here is a picture of the wood fired boiler I'll be using. It's going to take alot of work to dig up the water lines. Their down a good 3 feet in an insulated box. We Used it to heat the old farm house before we tore the house down. We went thru about 7 to 10 chords of wood in the winter.

Here is a picture of the elevated fish tank. It's stainless steel and has 1 inch pvc connector in the bottom. Holds about 50 gallons

Picture of future grow beds.

Picture of an old sheep water trough. Will be the Sump Tank and sit under the FT. Needs alot of cleaning. Have not decided to line it or use fish safe paint.

Picture of the constant heigh stand pipe. I need to come up with another pipe around it so as to lift the water and fish poo out of the FT.

I took pictures of the pumps I'll be using. One for operations and one for a backup. Can't find the camera cable so I can't off load on to the computer yet. As soon as I can find it, I'll send more pictures and details. The pumps are from those quick set up backyard pools. The ones that use air to keep the walls up as they are filling with water. The Pumps are Model F600C. Rated at 115v ac and 0.8A. Found a link for the data sheet/documents but I'll have to dig out. I'll have to experiment and see how much head the pumps will produce. I don't want to burn them out.

Feature creep is setting in and starting to run wild here. I can't spend much time out side so I've taken over a small part of the living room. I hear about it if it gets too messy. We all will be very happy when it's warm enough to move back into the shop.

I've added 2 more features to my pie in the sky.

After the grow beds, I'd like to run the water down some sprouting beds. The purpose would be to just sprout oats or barley for a couple of days. I'm not interested in supply nutrients, just want the water for sprouting. Sprouts will go to meat goats.

The other feature I'm adding is a way to monitor and report the system back to the house. No controlling functions at this point. I've started messing with some Parallax products. Their Board of Education (BOE), a SX stamp, and their sonar module. First job will be to measure the water height in the sump tank. I'll use the old float trick for control, the one I've seen on this forum. The one with a float connected to a rod which is connected to a standard household wall switch to control the pump.

We recently upgraded our wireless router and I'm drooling over the old router (a Linksys WRT 150 N version 1.1). I remember reading something about someone modifing a 2nd router by replacing the firmware. Why do you folks have to swhare so much information Redoing firmware is a little above my pay grade at this point. But it will be fun to try in the future. I did some signal strength testing of the new router ( D-Link DIR 628). Using an eReader (Nookcolor) I was able to surf the net from our box some 500 feet away. Hmmmm another project? Oh no, MUST RESIST, MUST RESIST. By the way, the minute I stepped into the out buildings I'd loose the router signal. Metal siding and roofing. I'll have to place wireless stuff in an out building window.

Gotta go for now. I'll be back on screen in a couple days.

Picture of the PING sonar module to measure water height in the sump tank

Picture of OWL data logger. Product sold by Tracy Allen and his company EMS. Tracy also did a lot of work for Parallax and their "Stamps in the Classroom" curriculum. I'll be relying heavily on Parallax documentation and code examples. The OWL will be used next winter after prototyping on Parallax's BOE. More pictures to follow.

Side view of the double stacked boards that make up the OWL data logger.