Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Nor for that matter is zeolite particularly efficient... it will bind ammonia for a while, but will become "saturated".... and under some conditions... will release/unbind the ammonia...

OK for emergency use only... to buy some time while you address the problem...

Will salt water release the ammonia from charcoal, as it does zeolite?

Nope... because it wont have any ammonia in it....

Therefore it would make a good GB media?

Ummm, with grow bed media we want the bacteria to break down the ammonia, not absorb it to release it later.
Let nature do the work man and like Rupe said, use this stuff in emergencies till you figure out whats gone wrong

I may avoid charcoal, glad to see its working for Dave. My apologies for diverting your thread.

The stuff is extremely inert. It may absorb (read: "trap") some things but the microbes that live in the pores will have access to it and can transform it. I view it as a limited sponge. BTW I am not using activated charcoal so it will be limited in absorption anyway. Think of the stuff I am using as gravel if that helps.

correct me if wrong jd,
he and i handle large quantitys of fish, over the years both charcoal, and zeolite have been used in the filtration aspects of our trade. both have failed both have been atributed to losses of money. both medias were hyped and widely used, both have fallen out of favor....kinda correct here jd?
but as i have stated AP is the final piece of this puzzle for me, the uses of these to medias sparks intrest from me, but i will sit back and watch. perhaps used in an AP system they will live up to former expectations. just a feeling i got here... just my opinion ...and we know what that's worth.
bw

Even simpler, think of it as a surface for the bacteria to grow on, which is really all I am asking from it.

Plant pictures today, the one basil plant looks like a real plant now, the coriander (on the small shelf) is all tangled up because of lack of light probably, it's been really cloudy the past month since the snow came.

These are the fish supporting the plants (20 gallon aquarium). The yellow water color tells me I could add more plants, I think.

Big dump of ideas, lots of brainpower used up thinking about this year's setup. Have to get ready to start up before the end of the month. I think President's Day is a good deadline because we get that day off from work.

The plan is to make an aerated solids digester after the FT, try to keep the solids in it, then feed the plants from the clear water after. I looked at whether laundry tubs could fit in the standard 110 gallon Tuff Stuff tubs, and two can fit in there. The idea there is to turn over the laundry tubs upside down, so that it tapers upward. Solids would be encouraged to settle around the edges as they rise before reaching the top edge of the outer tub, where the outlet would be. Bubbles would keep the solids moving and suspended in the two laundry tubs.

Then I revisited the idea of building a plywood tank (raceway) in the garage, with an N-shaped cross section on one end. Maybe not an N but maybe rather a | \| shape with the solids coming from the fish into the | \ heavily aerated area, then flowing up and out through the \| area, solids would hopefully settle out to the bottom of that, staying in the aerated | \ part. The tank in the garage would be fed from the sump outside and flow through the garage wall to the plants and the sump.

Currently I'm thinking of making a settling cone using pond liner and rivets, maybe with metal strips for support at the seam. This could be attached to the side of a round oval stock tank (sandwiching the cone liner in the outlet fitting), the majority of the stock tank would be kept boiling with air stones everywhere. Water from the FT would be pumped into it. Same goal, to capture and aerate the solids. One article I read online about activated sludge said that tall narrow containers work better to keep the solids suspended which makes sense to me; another way may be to use a barrel and progressively widening PVC pipe for the settling "cone".

I may try different plumbing for the bed burritos; previously the idea was to a have pipe with holes all long trickling down through the media, but the issue with that is to have even flow all along the length. Another way of thinking of the cross section would be as a media-filled NFT device. Since the gutter is made from plastic anyway it could allow some water level and flow through there, along the length. The landscape fabric would keep roots from blocking this drain. The burrito would not process solids anymore with that setup, only get nutrients that are dissolved in the water. I think I can plumb fittings so that lower rows can receive water from upper rows, in a cascade from top to bottom and along each row before it leaves them. I may use pond liner for the gutter for more reliability.

The general idea right now is to use the pattern of a sub-irrigated planter everywhere that plants are grown. If solids are mostly processed in the aerated solids digester thingo and the nutrients are assumed to be dissolved in the water then that affects the plant setup, maybe freeing things up for more wacky ideas.

In the Rendezvous setup the planter is filtering solids and is supposed to use up nutrients, with a separate biofilter being used for nitrification. Now I am looking at not using the planters/beds as the main solids handling thing but instead handling solids in the digester. Now the planters only handle nitrates and nutrient uptake.

I thought all the planters now could be SIPs of a sort, but then thought that somehow the water should flow through rather than just diffuse through the planter. Diffusion alone would probably be inefficient. I had thought about just sitting them in the sump under the water maybe a couple inches, just submerging the drain holes. Now I am thinking about cheap storage tubs fitting tightly in a narrow long lagoon, such that water would have to flow through the tub, from holes on one end to the other end. The storage tubs could be removed and set aside like a plain old dumb SIP, watered like any other SIP, or placed into the lagoon to recharge or help uptake nutrients faster because of the flow through.

If the SIPs are only watered to a depth of a few inches on the bottom, then maybe the bottom of the SIPs could use inert media but the top layer use something less inert, maybe some kind of cheap mulch? It would be like a slow moving stream at the very bottom of the SIP when it was inserted in the system. If the top layers were moist but never wet then maybe less inert stuff could be used above the water line.

I'm thinking about:

"Long Path": If the water has to follow a long path from the fish through the plants then nitrification may work satisfactorily without using media (i.e. UVI talking about bacteria on sides of tanks, on roots, and on bottoms of rafts).

"Any Container, Any Media": Setting the plants up to use SIPs means I can use basically anything for a planter. If the water line is limited to the bottom of the planter always then maybe any media can be used for the top layer of the planter, not just inert media.

Continued thinking about the bed burrito on the commute to work this morning. I came up with this (cross section), which is to use landscape fabric in two channels that rest against each other (to make the upper surface more horizontal for planting rather than almost vertical if there were only a single tear drop shape), with rails maybe using bamboo, with pond liner or plastic attached to the rails form a gutter. All the fabric could be attached to a single (strong) rail at the top.

This seemed rather complicated to put together, this evening I am instead considering a simpler trough using a ladder-shaped truss to hold the gutter shape. It could still use layers of fabric and pond liner to hold the media and water, but would be simpler to make. The reason I was enclosing the media on all sides with the teardrop shape was to use fabric tension to help hold the plants in place, since the media is too light to do the job. Think of the media as being squeezed to support the plants, rather than weighing the roots down due to media weight.

That looks like a bra

I agree, it's a kind of biological looking. This morning I'm thinking about using good old PVC pipe to make a truss to support the liner and fabric, for the smaller enclosed burrito. Just found a problem though, have to think about that a bit more.

To make a large suspended bed I think a combination of 2x4s, maybe a 2x6, some wire mesh, etc. could work and be supported only with a single beam, hung with joist hangers on 4x4 posts.

A lined trough could be made with just PVC pipe and liner too, two horizontal rails with tees joining the rails to 90 degree elbows to form like a coat hanger shape. Wires would tie to the top of the elbows to hang it. The liner could be punched with holes to thread it into the rails, if the load was not too heavy then the liner should be able to hold.