Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I agree TCLynx, peeponics is awesome! It's beyond me why more people don't do it! maybe it's the yuck factor.

It would be great to use peeponics to grow aquatic plants that grow extremely quickly and produce a lot of organic matter for compost like Water Hyacinth or reeds. This way urine could be utilized to increase the amount of carbon/compost in a system without the whole yuck factor of peeponics. Just a thought. Duckweed seems like a good use for it too!

There should be a new chapter in the humanure handbook on this! Great thread...I may just try this instead for my first system, I won't do aquaponics yet, I'll do a pee ponics...

I'm afraid ! lol

jeff c

My sewerage system gets all the water from the house (including the toilet) and processes it and pumps it out onto the fruit trees. We get great fruit and the nutrients don't get into the ground water and cause algal blooms. Does this count as peeponics?

Depends on your def. Two issues I see are 1) you are not recirculating the water and 2) there are some contaminants that are not typically found in pee.

Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of dumping all those nutes deep into the ground or into rivers, we created environmentally rich green islands around our homes? Of course, this might work best in sparsely populated dry regions... Critters would certainly appreciate these little oases, but there would probably be some unforseen effect that would cause the whole thing to be an environmental neg.
*sigh*

The only Neg I could see with utilizing all the nutritious waste from a household is that some people can't be trusted to manage it properly. The truth is using a septic system or sewer system to carry away waste while convenient doesn't take care of the pollution problems, it just pushes them out of sight for the most part.

Proper composting does a far better job of taking care of most of the possible negatives provided it is managed properly. It doesn't take much to manage it properly but some people can't be trusted to get a toilet fixed when it clogs and they will simply start pooping in the bathtub if you know what I mean.

Anyway, for those who will manage their household waste products in a responsible manner, it doesn't require a dry climate nor that much property to turn the area into a far richer bit of land. And when it is your own household waste that you are dealing with, you can be more careful about what is in it and avoid things like the heavy metals and other industrial toxic substances that tend to get into the public sewage systems and make the solid products of those systems unsuitable for food production.

TCLynx, I agree with you that many people can't be trusted to maintain the system properly. My system has aerobic and anaerobic digestion stages and the water is then chlorinated and filtered before being used on my fruit trees. I'm also careful to make sure the drippers can't accidently spray onto leaves or fruit.
When the system was originally installed, the requirements from the WA Health Dept was to have sprays instead of drippers. That would aerosolise any pathogens that survived the treatment process. I "improved" the system by replacing sprays with drippers, but I didn't want a fight with the Department, so I didn't tell them. Now the regulations have changed to allow drippers!
PS I'm a (non-practising) chemical engineer, so at least I know what I'm doing.

Crazy that the department would have specified sprayers!

I'm actually far more supportive of the very low tech ways to re-use gray water and that it should be used immediately. Then again, Florida doesn't have any appropriate regs pertaining to composting toilets or graywater re-use so super low tech is the only way to do it here. As in carry the dish pan out to the compost or garden or have a bucket in the shower or a hose out to mulch pits around trees from the washer sort of low tech.

We don't use clean drinking water to take care of toilets. We humanure compost using the sawdust bucket method (there is still a flush toilet in the house but it rarely gets used.)

So, I recently killed a bed of lettuce with an experimental PeePonics.



But I assume it was just the quantity that I added, that was the problem. The lettuce died and the weird thing was that the tomato sproutling was still going.

I moved the whole experiment outside after flushing (sorry) the majority of the liquid.



Anyways, I am going to start over again, and I've decided to use urine from certain times, for instance, after I drink a lot of tea (a herb drink which I am very fond of) and drink some coffee and / or some juice (yes I am a juiceman), the urine is actually clear and mostly water. I suspect this will have a more neutral PH, and hence I can store and use a lot more of this water.



Anyways, this may re-start the PeePonics thread again, hopefully, as I see it's been a while since anyone contributed.



later all,

Jeff C

P.S. I know it's kinda interesting, so I may as well write this too: Doing my small PeePonics experiment, made me feel like my body was an excellent water filter, anyone else feel that way? Or at least, like it had that potential anyways...!?!

Hey Jeff, did you age the urine or use it straightaway?

Pee can be strong stuff, I was able to cycle up a 600 gallon system with usually less than 1 pee a day.

In my opinion I REALLY don't this this would ever be a problem. MOST people prefer to live in sanitary conditions, and the very few people who would behave as you described are probably already living like that ! So it wouldn't actually make any difference.
People do what they have to do. Back before septic, people got their dunnies emptied by blokes with buckets (while the kids tried to trip them over while carrying full buckets of poo)

Crazy that we allow a bunch of fat bureaucrats make decisions on things like this that they know nothing and care nothing about. Rules for the sake of rules...

Haven't started my aquaponics system yet, but I just decided today to start feeding my aquarium plants this magical yellow liquid to see if they will grow faster (I have a fishless tank that I'm using just to rehabilitate some plants after lots of abuse from a pleco) I was chucking some food in there to produce the nitrates but it gets lots of fungus on it and looks dodgy. But I suppose peeing in the tank is kinda dodgy too

I have been making liquid fertilizer for a while now by just aging my urine for several months. Works great on the lawn. Will be starting a small peeponics system next to my ap system. Is there anyone out there like me that "holds it" til they get home so they can collect the liquid gold? Or when using a public toilet...thinks, "Oh that was such a waste"???


MM