Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Water temps have been pretty steady recently, with quite a lot of cloudy weather, and lots of rain so far this month

Capsicum and chives!

I see you are adding Polycarb Sheeting to the structure, albeit clear...
Are you happy with the reduced UV transmission, or is that just an unfortunate compromise..

Looking good

..

Added 3 years ago Not concerned about UV, but wanted plenty of light, reduced wind, and no parrots The polycarbonate does the job quite well.

awesome animation! You keep the bar high here Gunagulla

Thanks Brian

I harvested our 5 turmeric plants today



I'll keep some of them in the fridge to sell at the market next weekend, and freeze some for our own use.

Ooh, very nice. (You're ~500km north of where I am, that must translate into a decent jump in temperature if you can get turmeric to grow that nicely!)

Oh, I'm not sure it is that much of a jump, Mel! Water temp in the system was 5.7C this morning, and has only risen to 6.8 this arvo, despite a bit of sun through the middle of the day, and there was frost on the chook shed roof at 5:15pm yesterday afternoon.

We hit -4.5C last night and the temperature in my little test system was under 2C. Also, this was in the bird bath:





I don't think turmeric would like it here!

The cloud coming over in the middle of the night meant we only got down to -0.5 here, but I have seen ice that thick occasionally here.
Once you get a larger FT water volume, it wont cool down so much. I only pump 5 or 10 mins in the hour at night, which helps reduce the cooling a bit.

(Okay okay, I'll stop trying to one-up you on the weather. )

I am looking forward to seeing what the difference is once I have my big system going, yes! (Tanks should arrive Wednesday, woot!)

Your temperature charts were what inspired me to start tracking my own numbers, by the way. Mine are a lot simpler 'cause I'm not willing to spend $200+ on HOBO dataloggers (no matter how cool they are) and the arduino stuff is a bit beyond my abilities at the moment. The little temperature probe I've got can only record a maximum and minimum between checks, but it's still cool to see how it goes. I'm going to get a second one so I can see how much of a difference the hoop house makes in the air temperature, too.

Data loggers can be found for well under $200...
http://www.instrumentchoice.com.au/inst ... ogger-sp3s

Still a tad more than I'm really able to pay given that I don't need that sort of precision, I'd just like it... Thanks for the link, though, that sort of thing is fascinating!

The HOBO ones were $80+ for each pendant datalogger, but the base station you have to use to plug them into your computer was $120, so a minimum spend of $200 or so.

Winter is definitely here, it only got up to 5.4C yesterday and there was a good cover of snow on the range to the SE today, although it had mostly melted by late this afternoon.
The FT water was only 5.5C this morning, yet the fish were still eating, although not a huge amount- I only gave them a couple of 50g feeds today. We are meant to have a few sunny days after frosty mornings now, so I hope the water will heat up a bit.

I've planted a few peas and chard seedlings, mainly in the outside GB#9, in recent days