Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

wow, I have a cubic foot spare you can have for $50, half your price
(couldnt resist)

Yard, I meant yard....

I have a scoria question about wicking / evaporation for y'all.

I seem to have a huge evaporation problem. Granted, I'm in central texas where it does get a little warm, but I noticed that the top of my scoria growbed is always moist. They are flood and drain, and the siphon is an inch below the top of the media, but the top is still wet.

Is the scoria wicking moisture to the top, where it subsequently evaporates in huge quantities in the 35C heat?

Dig down when water is at it's highest point and have a look. If it's 1" make it 2". Mine is dry AND wet in areas and is about 2" down


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Scoria does wick more than many other medias so most people do have the fill point 2" below the surface. If you have well established plants there is no reason why you couldn't make it 3" or 4" from the surface. I wouldn't lower it to 4" all at once though. Lower it 1" and then a week later lower it again. Leaving a week between lowerings give the plants roots time to chase the moisture down.

Unfortunately I built my siphons after spending ~ 4 mins reading about aquaponics siphons instead of doing real research, and now have no access to them without pulling out all the media. I'll suck it up until I rebuild the system from scratch.

Thanks all for the input.

Yea... And scoria is not exactly easy to jam a media guard into...

Take a home depot bucket and cut the bottom off. Rotate it around as you push it down around your siphon. Once to the bottom, scoop out the scoria, place your media guard and pull the bucket. I did that when I need to make some changes. My bed was not yet planted which would be much more difficult.

+1 for the wicking bit, but adjusting the tide it might change the volume of useful bacteria real estate.

+ 1 for that as well

On the weekend (4 days ago) I added a 2nd grow bed of half an ibc's with approximately 500lt of scoria, I spent a few hours washing it and removed about 20lt of sand from it, my water however if still the colour of chocolate milk 4 days later, I know it will clear up in its own good time and to help it along I am running constant flood for awhile.
A couple of questions here though:
1: is it ok to add trout to my chocolate milk, will the fine particles harm their gills or anything? Or am I better off waiting until they and I can see the food, them so they can eat it and me so I can see if there are left overs I need to remove?
2: can you do reliable water tests on chocolate milk?
3: a bit OT but Will running my beds constant flood drown the worms I have added to the beds?
Cheers
Ben.

1. Yes probably but I wouldn't, what is a few more days of patience.

2. No.

3. No. Worms absorb O2 through there wet skin. As long as there is enough O2 in the water they are fine.

Thanks, I'll wait out on the fish then and there should be plenty of O2 with all the water movement and splashing and no one to use it up.
Thanks mate.

Why is this Stuart?

A better answer would be possible but difficult and generally not with standard BYAP testing gear.

The colour of the water alters the colour of the testing which will very likely give you a wrong answer when you try and match the colours on the chart.

Although since I posted that Samuel L Jackson has suggested that you can dilute a sample to reduce the colour and then test the diluted sample. Just have to remember to correct the reading by however much you diluted your initial sample.