Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks Gabe and Happy New Year!

Hiya Gabe, oh no that wasn't the beast...
I'm North of you in Goosie Hill, yeah temps are cooking here also however I'm fortunate enough to have the ft in the shade. It's nowhere as aesthetically pleasing as yours but I'm working on it.

yikes it is kind of scary hearing of all the things we'll need to watch out for. Thanks for sharing

I started playing with arduino's recently and decided to use one to monitor my system parameters. At this stage it is recording ambient temperature & humidity as well as water temperature. Recording is to a SD card which i have to manually download.

I may add a pH probe at a later stage ( hoping the ausie dollar recover to make it affordable!)

Once i have a weeks data i will post them. here is a few pictures.

The arduino in its weatherproof box. The polystyrene box house the ambient sensor.


Display with time, ambient temp, humidity and water temperature


The SD card

And here is a few random pictures taken today.

Took a picture of the bush fires towards the east this evening (5s exposure) . Apparently not posing any threat and far from me. Still remains very scary!

Here is the temperature in my DWC and ambient temperature with the Arduino data logger.

I will add another temp probe to measure the water in the pond. I suspect that the DWC heats up more during the day due to the low turnover.

Wow Gabe, you have quite large water temp swings there, looks to be about twice what I see in my system.

Yes I also compared my changes with yours. I suspect that the swings are because the probe is in the DWC bed which have a low water turnover and get a lot of sun. Tomorrow another probe wil go into the main pond.

off topic a little. I'm interested as well as the ardunio, in the strawberry tower design. Does water simply trickle down the media inside?

Hi Brian

Yes - the water trickle down the inside, the slots are filled with expanded clay pebbles. I use 100mm pipes. I found that after a year the strawberries starts blocking the slots. I then redo the tower.

i also prefilter the water to remove all solids. This reduce the amount of build-up in the towers.

Here is a bit more data from the system. I thought that the water temperature in the pond would be more stable but it shows the same big swings as the water in the DWC.

A few recent pictures

First one is not related to aquaponics. I "harvested" my first beehive two weekends ago. I ended up with 20 kg honey and 1 kg of beeswax from one hive! And i have three more to harvest

Here is a picture of some of the harvest. I have been handing out bottles of honey to friends. I replaced the empty super with a new super two weeks ago. This weekend i had a peek - and the new box is already nearly filled - the Mari trees are flowering at the moment. I may have to run a stall at the local market to get rid of the surplus.




I found a nifty way to clean my hydroton growbeds (similar to a video placed by Rob on this forum a while ago).

I bought a pressure connector for the garden hose from bunnings. This easily push into the growbed and agitate the clay balls. This water was discarded to the normal garden. Works really well on the hydroton but it didn't work on the rock filled growbeds (i couldn't get it into the medium).

Honey harvest is pretty damn cool feeling right. Ours have been coming inside with the unusually warn days. On the cleaning, It mustn't disturb the plants in the terribly. This is good to know. Thank you

Time for a few pictures. I now have a off-line mineralisation "bucket" going. I collect the waste from a swirl filter, let it ferment (anaerobically) for one week, then add air (and a bit of flour for carbon) for another week. After letting it settle i return the top layer back into the system.

This is similar to what Cookie is doing in his system. Still early days but looks promising.

Here is a few random pictures


The reason i started the off-line mineralisation!