Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'm not sure if the thought's of medications have been brought up I would assume they have..

Be-careful if you are on medication..

You will end up pee some form of by-product into the pee..


If I remember correctly there are high concentrations of female hormone in outflow from our sewerage farms..
and considering the Victorian farms are rated as some of the best in the world.. and the outflow if being used as recycled water..

Juergen

I have already started collecting humonia for my AP set that i am collecting parts for. A great read thank you TC for putting the time and effort in. Will you be able to feed your duckweed to your fish too?

Never mind. I just found and read your duckweed peeponics thread

Try as I may, I just can't read any more... my eyes are crossing. I have followed all I can to get to here. I have a couple of questions please...

Urine to be stored and aged... not kept cold? Room temp right? (how long does pee store?)
in a sealed jar or open top?
Medication..... any medication used that would make it not good to use in peeponics?
Dosage... what is the general amount to put in a system to start the cycling process?
How much after that? (less or same dosage amount)
Effectiveness.... is urine more or less effective or the same varying on the yellow color. (sometimes mine is nearly clear.. is it less effective or not?) Is first morning urine a good time to collect or not.

Thanks for the information.

Do you seal it when aging it? If so, does it go anaerobic and stink or bloat/break the container? I can't see having months worth of open contianers of urine laying around, but I'm really intrigued by PeePonics.

I usually store urine in a sealed water or juice bottle.
Being sealed up for a few weeks is usually enough for the urea to convert to ammonia and raise the pH which is what kills things like e. coli.
Strength of urine will vary from person to person and by time of day and the amount of water one drinks. I don't know how much the color affects is since that can also vary by diet too.
So amounts to use will be a bit aprox and you will have to test and adjust the dosing based on water tests.

I found that a barrel ponics size system only needed about 200 ml of humonia every few days to keep the nutrients really high.

Room temp is fine, outdoor temp is fine as long as it does not freeze and break the jar...
As it ages it breaks down into ammonia and other nasties, so becomes darned toxic to most organisms. I should think it would store indefinitely.


I understand that urea gives off some CO2 as it decomposes into ammonia, so that might build up some pressure...or carbonation. I would leave some head space so the aged stuff does not squirt out if it should build a little pressure through warmth, CO2, or something else... Better safe than smelly.


antibiotics would be especially bad. Unsure about others, but remember that whatever does not degrade in AP will build up or get fed back to you through the plants and fish. Metals, drugs, salts, metabolites...

thank you for the answers... appreciate it.

Hey there, just read the thread

A lot of very useful information, and I am reading up on the Humanure Handbook too as I would ideally like to live remotely (ie, without 'town' services) and was wondering what to do with my waste.

Is the system still up and running? Any longer term things crop up, specifically with the PeePonics, that might not have presented in a younger system?

Not too sure what exactly what, but I am definitely curious.

I'm no longer running a pee ponics system but during the time I was running it, the system seemed to need about the same supplementing as the aquaponics.

Cool. Thanks for the response, and thanks for all the great info.

Next step - do something with towers

I too found that iron and magnesium were lacking. But I like pee poniics because you don't have to be concerned about the fish. Did you have to add anything else?

I think I found that I had to supplement about the same way I did for Aquaponics (and this will vary largely based on your source water more than if it is pee or fish.)

Be prepared to adjust calcium and potassium buffers based on plant needs or perhaps using some seaweed extract.
I had Iron deficiencies because of high pH and lack of much Iron in the well water. At the old house I think we had more magnesium in the well water because I don't remember any magnesium deficiencies there. Here at the new house the well water seems to have almost all calcium and little/no magnesium so I am seeing magnesium deficiencies here. All systems here at the new farm are currently either Aquaponics, Vermiponics, or Duck-a-ponics.
New farm has no pee ponics.

Hi Bob...Hi TC
Yeah, I add a bit of iron. I didn't wait for deficiencies to crop up and I only dosed Fe to like 0.5ppm to 1ppm. So far so good. The Mg like TC says, will depend a lot on your source water, but also from you diet. Notice the whitish precipitates that settle out at the bottom of your humonia bottles. Some of that is MAP crystals (magnesium, ammonia, phosphate crystals...struvite basically). The more Mg in your urine the more MAP crystals will form as the urea converts to ammonia and the pH rises. Since there are more phosphates (PO4) than Mg in there, Mg is the limiting factor in this process of precipitation...meaning the crystallization process stops when the Mg gets 'used up'. When you add the MAP crystals (by shaking the bottle and adding the humonia) to even slightly acidic system water (pH under 7) they dissolve and the PO4 as well as the Mg become bio-available to plants. Some of my bottles have a lot of these precipitates present, while other bottles have much less in there. So it stands to reason that your diet can also play a 'significant' role on that front. In addition to not dealing with fish...not having to deal with solids maybe another benefit.

informative post vlad, cheers !