Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Rupe,
Beautiful heater. One Q: while you were away and the system temp did so well, was the fishtank still covered?
Dustin

Tank has been covered since 23/07... before I went away Hydro... and has remained so since.

So Rupe ,
Do you have a plan for when you'll be marketing/supplying these babies ? You have me chucking away my plan to stick some polypipe on the roof and rough it.

I'm in the process of setting up a second separate system at the moment so I will have two 1000ish litre tanks to warm up next winter. Any possibility to draw / send water to two different places ?


rgds DJ

Well the weather has been reasonably kind for a day or two after a two day severe weather crash.... then has tapered off to be consistantly "temperate" for most of the past week...

With tank temps recovering rapidly back to about an average of 22 degrees and about 18 degrees overnight...


Yesterday saw a marked rise in tank temps to 27 at 15:00.... and today dawned sunny... and warm...

I thought I'd do some work around the garden... t-shirt & boardies...

Thought crossed my mind that the yabbies in the 1500ltr tank must be enjoying the warmer water...

Went to check the solar array and tank temperature about 14:00.... ....

Is that the temp of the fish tank or of the holding tank Rupe?

There's only about a dozen yabbies in the 1500ltr tank... so I hadn't bothered to set up any aeration or bio-filtration...

Figured they were going to move this weekend anyway....

But with the tank at 28 degrees by 14:00.... figured it might be prudent to either switch the array off... or at least pull the temp down a bit and provide some aeration...

Siphoned off about 200ltrs and topped the tank up... wacked a little pond pump in just to stir things around a bit...



With the forecast tomorrow of a wet, windy, cold day... I didn't want to pull the tank temp down to much....

And I wanted to leave the array on .... just to see if I could nudge 30 degrees today...

P.S. .... tank temps VB....

So an hour, and three pump cycles of the array.... still at 28 degrees...

Yabbies have grown markedly over the last couple of weeks.... hopefully they might be feeling romantic in the nice balmy water...

+1 lol

Yep... just as soon as I've found/built a container to fit everything into... so I can freight them.....soon, hopefully... but I figure I've got all summer....

So many things to buy - yet so little money

Like it Rope, big thing is that once the temp is up around the 25C+ mark it is easier to keep it there...got the reflectors yet?

Nah, they were delayed in customs... and I'm over committed at the moment... grrrr.

As of 20:00 ... array off (dark).... aerating pump off (turned off 16:00 - 28 degrees)...

Tank temp at 26 degrees, clear night with air temp dropping... reckon it'll still hold 23/24 overnight....

Interestingly... air temp 09:00 was 16.5 degrees... after an overnight min of 7 degrees...

Temp at 15:00 was 17.8 degrees..... might have jumped the gun a little... air temp has been dropping since then....

Not sure (yet) what the posted max for the day was... but it was a darn nice day... enjoyed being out in the garden....

Just a note on the operation of the stainless tube exchanger... excuse the crude drawing...


Heated water flows through inner core (heating inner stainless tube) and then circulates between the inner and outer "finned" wall.... heating outer wall and echanging to the tank water...

Actually a round "finned" tubing... bit like a vacumn cleaner hose....

Will get a picture next time I'm up there...

So what is between the inner and outer wall Rupe?