Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here are a few pictures of my thrown-together system.....Consists of FT that is an old tv satellite dish that has contained carp gold fish for the past 10 years....It has a homemade waterfall for
aeriation and I use an old claw foot bath tub for the grow media (hydroton). I have a 960 gpm submersible
pump in the bottom of the FT and have a bell syphon drain....Yesterday, I planted 6 cherry tomato plants and
6 jalapeno pepper plants....

and a couple more pictures:

My pump is 960 gallons per hour, not per minute.....

Part of me wants to clean up that old bathtub and put it in my bathroom. I saw that you used a satellite dish, and I imagined the old unused 30cm one I have on my roof. But that does look considerably bigger!

Have you had any troubles with birdies taking your fish with it being uncovered?

Hey, Columnmn,

No, no problems with birds, maybe an occasional coon or cat, but I've never caught them....
The satellite dish is 10' in diameter..about 24" deep.One that came out in the early 70's.
That old bath tub was old when I was a youngster and I'm 72 now.....

You can't get bathtubs like that these days. You could go for a swim in that thing! A bit of a sand, some paint and some love and it's come up a treat.

We had a dam when I was younger, and dad put a stack of fingerlings in there. Gave it a week, and some fat birds, and they were all gone! I haven't been game to go without a cover these days.

I've broken the two legs off the other side over the years for various reasons and that's why
it is resting on the 2 x 6 frame. Otherwise, it is ready for installation with as you say a little
tlc.......

I'll bet the thing weighs over 200 lbs. Takes two men with all eyes shut to move it.
That makes it easy to break in picking it up and setting it down. I move it with a front end
loader on my tractor.

The legs are made of cast iron and are easily broken....If I looked real hard for them, I could
probably find them and have them repaired by someone who welds cast iron....

I have used both the satellite dish and the tub as horse watering troughs back when I had horses.
Nowadays it's 4 wheel atvs.

Pictures showing cover over GB...

Recycle time is 15 minutes...

If you hold your phone camera horizontal rather than vertical, the picture can post at a larger size.
I think that's true....Comments anyone?

Usually yes, but it depends on your phone. If the pictures are too large, they make it tricky on computers with different resolutions where they need to scroll sideways to see the pictures.

Thanks Columnmn for the reply.

I'm about 3.7% computer literate, so I can only tell you what I know and scratch my head
about what's left.....

I have a LG-E970 phone, and after I download them to my files, I open them with "Paint"
to resize them for posting.....

If I post horizontally, I can usually post up to 200 Kbs, but on vertical 80 kbs.....

Does that make sense or have I not explained it well enough?

Mom just 'yoohooed' me for super and I ain't gonna miss it after her doing it for 52 years....

Looking forward to more comments from you....Leon

I'm a massive geek, so I can help

You've got a pretty good phone, but you may not need to resize them. I never do. You can also upload them directly from your phone, but depending on your internet connection, it might take a while.

Paint is painful to resize any photos, and you've got to do them all individually. I'd recommend downloading Picasa.
http://picasa.google.com.au/

It's a free google program, and makes it easy to resize any photo. Open the photos in the picasa viewer, and then click on the edit in picasa button, click on library, it'll open up into all the photos that you've just downloaded. Highlight them, and click on the export button, it'll give you the option to resize them how you want, or just make it a smaller file size without loosing noticeable quality.

Then you can upload them onto this site like you've normally done it.

And just to confuse you a little more, the easiest way I've found to download photos off my phone is this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta ... letransfer

It allows you to open a webpage that's similar to the windows explorer, and you can download the photos from there. Very quick, no cables, works like a charm.

OK Columnmn,

I've been trying the picasa....it will take some time for me to get used to it, but I'll try.

Thanks,.....,Leon

Just remember it's quite hard to properly break a computer, the more you fiddle with them, the easier it gets. We need more silver surfers online.

And if you're ever unsure of something, type it into google, and there will be a thousand of other people who've done the same thing, and you can see how they fixed it.