Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Outback,,you live in Kalgoolie , I live beside the ocean in Sydney,,,VERY different set of climatic factors , sowhat makes sense for me , may be completely wrong for you.

Tongue in cheek here,....., you use pumps????? AP is suppose to be ecological,,,I bucket my water by hand , the way nature intended:)

I seem to recall that most of perth is beside a whole heap of that ocean stuff.

Smiles.
Happy to agree to disagree re the heating.
If I fall on my behind and use BIG$$$ in electricity ,I will happily put those results here and happily cope with the "told you so".
Cheers

I had trout get to 25 deg no problems this year i will run my trout to 25 deg before harvest

i have also had trout above 20C cant remember exactly (no doubt someone will correct me with a 2006 post ) but i think as high as 24C. trick is O2 saturation and not constant temps above say 21.

if you feed your trout 3 times a day then an 8 month growing season should see them at least 1kg imo

First "google" led me to those Pemberton trout good for 23C. A buried tank here would be between 16 -22 all year round. I'm suspicious ,, something is not adding up ,, never seen trout grown near Sydney's coast.
Perhaps I need to be the first.
Looks like 2 systems are require ,, heated for JP and in-ground for trout.

chappo, i've been down the 'use the earth temp" path..............made not much difference when you hook up a big heat exchanger called a grow bed

unless you modify pump cycles, enclose the beds in a greenhouse (winter) or shade the system (summer)

Agreed , what your saying makes 100% sense.
The beds do have a large amount of thermal load ,, or thermal unload, lol .

Tank "A" insulated above ground connected to bio-filter "A" insulated above ground. Has connection to grow beds with ,, tap or valve so can be connected or disconnected.

Tank "B" buried , bio-filter "B" buried. Has connection to grow beds with ,, tap or valve so can be connected or disconnected.


Tank "A" fish , prefer 23C plus ,,
Tank "B" fish prefer less than 23 C.

Tank "A" heated ,, cycles water through grow beds when beds are at 23+ , tank "A" only cycles through bio-filer "A" and not grow beds ,when temp are below 23C.

Tank "B" only cycles water through grow beds with temp less than 23C and Tank "B" only cycles through bio-filter "B" and not grow beds ,when temps above 23C.

Clear as mud?

A winters night in Sydney would see tank B at say 16 C , bio-filter B at 16C and the grow beds a little lower than that ,, can cycle and fish etc happy.
A summers day will see Tank A and Biofilter A at around 27 C ,, can cycle to grow beds and everything happy.

Heat loses in Tank and bio=filter A are minimised , as in disconnected from grow beds when its cold .
Heat additions to Tank B and biofilter b are minimised , disconnected from grow beds when they are above 23 C

Could be manually handled , as temps dont change radically ,, but could also be engineered auto with those air-conditioning temp variable stepper motor valves.

Scotty, how did you setup that GNU plot graph? I have been jacking with it, but Im not getting anywhere.. I have another free graph program, but it will not let me do the nifty numbers and labels on the right side of the graph.

Hi DDM,



gnuplot is awesome! I've been using it for years.

set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y/%m/%d_%H:%M"
set format x "%d\n%b"
set ytics nomirror
set y2tics
set key right
set yrange [6.5:8]
set y2range [-1:41]
set ylabel "PH"
set y2label "NH3, NO2, NO3, Temp"
set grid y2tics xtics
plot 'waterQuality.data' using 1:2 t 'Ammonia (NH3)' with linespoints axes x1y2, 'waterQuality.data' using 1:3 t 'PH' with linespoints axes x1y1, 'waterQuality.data' using 1:4 t 'Nitrite (NO2)' with linespoints axes x1y2, 'waterQuality.data' using 1:5 t 'Nitrate (NO3)' with linespoints axes x1y2, 'waterQuality.data' using 1:6 t 'Water temp' with linespoints axes x1y2, 'ambient.temp' using 1:3 t 'Max air temp' with linespoints axes x1y2

Thanks Scotty! What does waterQuality.data look like?

& ambient.temp looks like this:

Not quite true, my SP's basically didn't eat at all for 6 months, but the vegies kept growing because of the buildup of nutes after last summer's barra.
Seems that if you have enough fish action over summer, the system will keep going.

Steem - the fish continue to produce ammonia evethough they are not eating. As their metabolism slows, what they produce will of course slow also - as will the amount of ammonia produced from crap as the crap reduces. SP and JP store fat for the cold times and they will burn this during the cold.

I'd be going for the auto. You'd want to switch over most nights to take advantage of cool nightime temps.