Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The weather is terrible.

The last week was cloudy, no direct sunshine at all, and its also cold. Daily average temp was -2C to +2C. The GH is loosing heat, water temp was down to 9C today morning.

WE NEED SUN!

Love that music ZsaZsa. You are a braver person than I living in a climate that cold, I am more of a reptile and require sun or I feel the need to hibernate.

Forcast for today foggy morning, daily max +4C but who cares if the sun is shining!



And the song for the day:



Thx for the kind words Faye.

The GH gained some heat yesterday, but the night was -8C... and its foggy, not sunny...

We are surrounded by hills, cold comes in hardly, but if it does, it stays for long. Thats what's happening now. Right now we are the coldest spot in central europe. Send me some sunshine!

Who wanna take tour with me?

We gonna cover:
- special weather conditions in the Pannonian Basin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannonian_Basin)
- mistakes that I made on GH building, and cameout only with the cold weather
- greens, biofilter and fish current condition

(Sorry for bad audio quality, again.)




- Other bad news, that since the weather is too cold, I cant get any catfish fingerlings.

Like ur video zsazsa..... tough going under those conditions... good luck to ya mate.

I have been rereading your thread. I understand the aggravation of killing fish and fighting PH. After changing all my gravel about 5M3 the Ph still did not come down yet. Still waiting.

On the matter of the SLO. Did you figure out how to make it work better? You were making it smaller on the thread I read. I think you would want to make it larger not smaller for better water flow which would give more suction on the bottom. Make more of the slots larger also to get more water flow.

Hopeing for some sunlight today, the forecast says maybe.

donone@ If I had to build everithing again I would use a bigger diameter, 63mm or 70 mm for the SLO. However the current design is working perfectly, I had no problem with it so far, a bigger pump could overflow the fishtank, but current setup fits togethet perfectly.

The current design is like this:


- 50mm elbow with a 10mm hole on the corner
- ~1m of 50mm pipe down to the bottom
- 50mm elbow
- ~0,5m 50mm pipe with approx 24 x 10mm holes in 3 rows on the bottom of the pipe, the end is closed.

The SLO cant suck enough because the dimension of the pipe, so the SLO action is fluctuate between overflowing and siphoning.

The cycle works like this:

1. The water level is below the hole on the top elbow, air goes to the pipe through the top hole. -> The water is rising a bit.
2. If the water reaches the hole, the SLO starts working as a siphon, and it sucking much more water than the pump feeds. -> The water level drops.
3. The water level dops below the top hole, it sucks air in and siphon is broken. -> Goto #1


Today morning I had a clogging in the irrigation pipe again. The fishpoo blocked the line for the last to GBs on the back wall. I closed (turned the elbows-taps upwards) the first two and after a few seconds the last two taps started waterring and "throwing up" the blocking fishpoo. It didn't took more than a minute to clean out a nasty clogging.

I had an 80% sunny day yesterday, and a verry cold night with lowest temp of -7C.
The sky is clear sun is shining, I hope to gain some heat today as well!

Other good news that I have finished tha Arduino based data logger. (I will publish the details of the construction.) I'm gonna install it today, so we'll see nice accurate temperature, sunlight, and hummidity graphs.

Good news today!

First of all, I had two sunny days in a row, that helped my mood.


Than I had installed the data logger yesterday.

The grey waterproof box holds the arduino micro computer, each white wire is for a sensor.
The whole thing is mounted over the fishtank.

It was around 5pm when I read the first data, and it was a pleasant surprise.

Outside temp: -2 C
Inside temp: 9,25 C
System water temp: 9,5 C
Thermal mass temp 11,25 C

Outside temp and Inside temp is normal, no question.

System water temp is 3-4 C higher than I expected. Its beacuse my fish style water thermometer is wrong. (Its a cheap baby bath water termometer which is designed to be acurate arround 34 C.) The happy news is that the system is much warmer than I thought.

Thermal mass temp this is gonna be the most intresting after all. Im quite delighted with the 11,25 C.

These four temperature graphs will show if the concept works or not. I cant wait to download the first 24hours

Love to check your updates, thanks for sharing! Keep on the good work, the GH is just awsome, can't wait to reconstruct mine into a solar one!

How is your politunnel working? What is the temp like?

Quick update: A sample from arduino datalogger the first few hours:

Night and the day was foggy. The system is still buggy mostly because the programing, I have to work on that, but its good enough for a sneak peak.



The sample shows the night and the dawn.

fény: This is the light, when it goes up thats tha dawn.
out: Outside temp: Shortly after dawn itr raises form -2 to around 0 C
sys: system water temp measured on the top of the FT. Is pretty stable, I only lost 0,6 C during the night.
in: Inside air temp. Nice stable its rising with the dawn as well.
mass: The thermal mass. This is the one thats slowly loosing temp during the night.

arduino the temperature of the box from inside. Thats heated by the chip it self.

Bottom line the last 24hours went like this:

outside temp: -2C by night, 0C by day foggy both day and night

system: 9,5 -> 8,88
inside: 7,38 -> 8,69
mass: 11,5 -> 9,69

Love it!

My politunnel has basically the same temps as the outside temps are, except if there is some sun, it usually overheats - that's where your thermal mass kicks in Lovvee it man, great data, confirms the theory of solar GH. A+