Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Depending on how far it is from GH to your house, this might work
I use three sending units. One for ambient temp, one for water temp, and one for wishful-thinking-that-I-still-had-a-greenhouse-to-measure-inside-temps.

Believe they work for distances of up to 100 Ft or 30 Meters.

You have an inexpensive pump. It probably uses quite a bit of juice and gets warm. I found that the less a pump costs, the more it costs to run. But any pump would probably get warm. That might be enough in a windless environment to add a few degrees.

I think a larger blob of water would lose temperature more slowly than a small flat shaped one.

Perhaps the large tank got the hot water from the hose that was in the sun all day. 3 litres of hot water would do it.

Perhaps the larger tank is up the hill a little. in a closed space, the coldth will run down to the bottom. In a house with still air, a few feet can make quite a bit of difference. On a hot day, after sitting on a chair for a while, lie on the floor. It's nice and cool down there.

If the tanks are partially buried, and one tank is lower down the hill, it might be effected by ground water.ie run off from a hillside catchment, just under the surface.

If the cool tank is closer to or touching the side of the growhouse it might be doing a heat exchange with the outside world.

If one end of the growhouse sees some shade before the other it might be gaining more heat during the day.

Even though your door would make a useful front entrance to a space station because it fits so snug, there is some slight chance of aditional airflow near the door adding to heat exchange with the outside.

If one is buried in sand and another in clay (or any other two different points on the dirt spectrum), there will be a difference in the heat exchange with the soil.

If both tanks are identical in every way, and burried, at 1 feet deep, and one is filled to a depth of 2 feet and the other 3 feet, the 2 fett deep on is half under ground and the 3 feet deep one is only 1/3 under ground. This is bound to have an impact unless the ground and water are all at exactly the same temperatures.

I may have finally managed to get that portal opened. It's summer here. Look for a small vertical puddle that eats light during the day, glows at night, makes a compass go funny, shows extra radio and TV stations on your local devices, makes your GPS think it's lost, and also has a faint eucalyptus scent.That will be the portal. If it's near your growhouse, it could just be that. If you do see it, can you through a twinky through. I've never seen one, and I've always wondered what they are.

one more....

If one is next to the wood, it might experence different heat exchange to the one next to plastic.

Bullwinkle, trust me, you don't want a Twinkie. They are the bastard child that happened when Monsanto raped ConAgra. Nothing edible should have a shelf life of 100 years. Plus one of it's listed ingredients is BEEF FAT. I capitalized it as it is in the ingredient list. It was one of he few things that did not have a name created in a laboratory. It was also the one ingredient I knew I did not want to eat.

My blender can boil water, so the notion of the pump heating the water is not so odd.

re: blender - really! ???

I thought it was a tiny amount of heat created by friction. I'm trying it now.

re: twinky - I don't want to EAT it. Just look at it, and maybe poke it with a stick.

Blender +1 degree C per minute!

some of that could have been heat transfer from the motor (hand held stick mixer with plastic outer and presumably metal shaft)

Amazing.

Thanks for the brain filler.

Here's a photo of my system, in its current incarnation. I didn't get home from work until midnight again, so I had to make do with a shot I had already taken, but it shows most of the important stuff...

The two black tanks are the as-yet-unconnected sump tanks. Both are buried to approximately the same depth. If you squint, you can see they're both filled to about the same height, too, which is just random coincidence. The one on the left has still water. The one on the right has a pump in it and the water is continually circulating up into the growbed and falling back down again. The tanks are about 2 feet apart, in the same sort of soil, and aren't touching anything around them except soil. They are both on the north side of the greenhouse, and if there were such a thing as direct sunlight up here this time of year, it would be coming from the south (to the right, the plastic side you can't see in the photo), and would shine on both of them equally.

Also, it had rained all day the day I dragged the hose out there, and there was no direct sunlight that could have warmed the water in the hose, plus it was several hours after dark when I filled the tanks, and cold. So if anything, the first tank I filled, the circulating one, would have gotten COLDER water, since it was in the hose sitting in the cold outdoors, while the water that came after it came out of the warmer well at ground temp.

Anyway... for what it's worth, here are the temps so far:

First night, 12/3:
Air 48ᵒF
Water 53ᵒF

Late morning, 12/4:
Air 56ᵒF
Circulating water 58ᵒF
Standing water (?) 47ᵒF (I may have misremembered the number, but significantly colder)

Late morning, 12/5
Air 42ᵒF
Circulating water 55ᵒF
Standing water 51.2ᵒF


And seriously? You can boil water in a blender? So how come my smoothies don't melt?

BW, if I can get to a store any time soon (my $#%@#$% coworker, not satisfied with having stolen my Thanksgiving holiday week from me, has extended her bogus medical leave and is stealing all the days the rest of us were supposed to have off this month, too, so free time is at a premium for a while) I will see if Twinkies can still be had. If so, I'll get you some.

G'night!

P.S. Yes, that's a space heater in the photo, just beyond the circulating sump. I was using it while I worked, to keep from freezing. But I unplugged it to plug in the pump, so it hasn't been contributing anything to the temperature readings since then.

That would do it. But I already have one of these, so I'll have to wait until it breaks, I guess. The exercise will be good for me, anyway.

Do you have snails and/or slugs in your part of the world?

I'm having huge troubles with them at the moment, and even though I've stopped them coming into the growhouse, the ones that are already in a reproducing like...like snails and slugs.

Unless you have a moat full of chickens or salt, it might be worth thinking about stringing up a little electric fence. if it's all sealed and baby slug proofed around the sides, running two wires around your door and connecting them to a nine volt battery will keep your system safe for years.

The easiest way I found to do it is to put pairs of nails on the corners so you can run some thin fencing wire around whatever you're trying to protect.

The battery lasts for years because it's only "on" when a snail crosses both wires. Snails recoil quite quickly from a nine volt zap.

Humans wont feel it unless they lick it.

Not so many snails, but slugs? Boy, do we ever have slugs. They have these behemoth slugs up here called "banana slugs." When I first heard of them, I thought they ate bananas or something, but I should have known better, since they don't grow bananas in this part of the country. Just after we moved north from Texas about 15 years ago, I went out after dark to put out the trash one night. I had gotten into the habit of running around barefoot, enjoying the absence of stinging/biting/venomous insects/snakes, and the soft grass without stickers or nettles.

So anyway, about halfway down the driveway with the rolling garbage can, I stepped on something that splurted up my leg all the way to my knee. That was when I found out they call them banana slugs because they are the SIZE of bananas.

But much juicier. And splurtier.

I don't go barefoot in the dark any more.



That's a very cool idea. (The fence, not the licking.) I'm not sure, actually, what banana slugs eat, but I've never found them on my plants. They have a wide variety of smaller cousins, however, that can mow down entire bushes overnight.

I'm still getting fresh hatch-lings emerging from my growbed. I't might go on for months. It's starting to cost too much in beer

I have a rare couple of days off work, finally. My coworker extended the medical leave for her sore muscles (I think she's angling to get off through Christmas too, humph!), so I'm still working 'way too much for my liking. The paychecks will be nice, though, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Still, it's keeping me away from my greenhouse!

Anyway, Hubs went and got me a load of lava rock (aka scoria) today, and I was so excited I started putting it into the system before I thought about taking a water sample to see how the pH, etc. are doing, first. Dangit. Oh, well. Guess I'll just let it settle for a week or so and then see how things are going.

I noticed a number of dead worms swirling around in the sump. I hadn't thought about the attraction of large quantities of water at ground level for them. Hmm. That will affect my nitrite levels, right? Is it going to be a problem? :/ It would be nice if there was a way to direct them up to the growbeds instead of having them keep suiciding in the sump.

My biggest accomplishment of the day was getting a 2" pipe pushed through uniseals in the two buried sump tanks. I didn't find any flexible tubing the right size in the limited time I had for hunting down parts, so I decided to make the PVC work. It was quite the chore, though, since the tanks were already in place and under the grow bed bench! Even with physics and levers and fulcrums, my girl-muscles weren't up to the task, so I had to recruit the Hubs. He got it done for me, yay! We got a lot of mud in the water in the process, though, and then I turned it red with the lava rock. I may have to do some filtering before it's fit for fish, but I guess there will be plenty of time for that.

I bet my muscles are sorer than my stupid coworker's are.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

+1 on the birthday

when you get some airation going in your system, the worms will find it easier to live even in water. Of course you could always put a few fish in the sump to eat algea, odds and ends, and the wayward worms that find their way in. As long as there is water in the sump, the fish should do fine even with the fluctuating water level. Airation is the key though.