Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Keep it coming Brain,really enjoy following your thread....

thanks you

I wasn't going to post this here because it is not specifically AP related. Truth is this is what it takes for a 61 year old hippie to get things done. Every step gets us closer to filling the FT, and this is what I live for.

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Good Morning

Holy Crap I’m beat tired. The old saying, “I’m so tired my eyes are crossed,” needs an update over here, “I’m so tired my fingers won’t type straight.”

I think it was worth it. The French doors are hung. I can’t quite tell if everything looks right, because I am so tired. One of my issues as I get older is, I can’t seem to get past the idea that I’m just working on one thing at a time. This idiosyncratic behavior has been building for a long while. It began innocently enough; if for example I needed a chisel to countersink a hinge I’d go find it in the shop. Looking first for it where it ought to be in the toolbox drawer marked “Chisels” More often than not the chisel I needed was still out on one of the work benches where I last used it, God only knows how many projects ago. Enter the second phase of madness. Clean work benches enough to find the chisel. Before the chisel is found, there are many many relics to pick up and cherish the memories. Next phase: Figure out where such a cherished relic ought to be placed, possibly label a new drawer specially for it. When I finally find the chisel, it is dull as a butter knife. Now go find the sharpening stone and hope it doesn’t need any attention.

It really is amazing I can accomplish anything at this rate. Oh, and now we have a whole new room for losing tools in; A lovely large Earth-sheltered aquaponics Greenhouse! Mental note to myself: Chisels are on the boardwalk in the greenhouse.


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Wanna guess where the concho belts used to be displayed? You would be correct if you guessed next to the window that laboriously got turned into a door. Yep in order to fit the door trim around the French doors I had to remove the trim board that held the wood heater clothes drying racks which btw Nell never did like, and consequentially were short lived. Another hour kilt, just getting ready for the trim, sigh. I know my honey will be happy the remnants of the indoor clothesline are gone.

So, how did the trim come out? I’m happy as my entry level OCD will allow.

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Of course with the “everything is a lifelong process, method of working, I decided I’d practice dong trim woodwork by doing the back door first. It looked pretty straight forward. After closer inspection I could see it presented several obstacles, mostly related to the extremely rough lumber the house was initially created with. The board on the left was 3/8ths of an inch thinner than the one on the left, neither are flush with the wall, and of course the door frame isn’t square. The practice run was a huge challenge and time consuming too. I think it was 2:00 PM when I finished that door and moved on to the French doors.

I did make a discovery on the back door. I’ve mulled over how to get the water to the greenhouse from the washer area. The pipe, in my mind at first went outside in a trench which thankfully looked like too much work from the start. Then I had the idea to bring it in below the back door, but hadn’t until yesterday seen how to protect it from getting kicked by people going out.

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Then while I was measuring the trim for the bottom of the back door I noticed there is a one inch square notch under the door base. I held off cutting the bottom trim and will install the PEX (plastic pipe) in that space and install the trim over it. Bingo!


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Not perfect, but good enough for me.

Well I now need to get ready for the JOB

Y’all have a great day.

Brian (Hide the Crazy) Rodgers

Good morning. The question of: Is Aquaponics sustainable on a commercial scale, is discussed here in depth: http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=346902#p346902I suggest in many of the blogs to which I belong, that I'm moving towards self-sufficiency. Will I ever attain self-sufficiency, probably not. I am happy thinking I can. I truly believe it is the experiences gathered on the journey which defines us. For example: We still need to buy fish food constantly, not to mention keep air and water pumps operating 24/7, and that is anything but cheap. Will it be super fun watching our fish swim and poo creating fertilizer for a year-round greenhouse full of veggies flowers? Yes! Realistically though we can't forget the pests that'll be attracted to a year round greenhouse. Speaking of moving toward a more comfortable (psychologically) size foot print; I've successfully navigated two weeks with not eating at restaurants. It can be done, and I feel great about the whole affair and reaped a few rewards too. It is incredible to calculate how much a month's worth of lunch can cost.

The door to eden? The playboy garden grotto? The door to some other world where man and nature are one? Well done... I had to go back a page and look at when it was a window again, looked like it was always there.

thank you thank you. One of the thrills of living in the space we're building is being able to walk into a new room. It is like you said, a whole other world.
this morning I'm adding circuits for greenhouse lighting. A couple three way switches, one on the French doors inside the house, and another inside the door leading to the garden.

I may be over-thinking the plumbing for my pond/fish tank. Nevertheless I am seeing that most aquaponics setups use a sump tank to accommodate water level changes as the fluid cycles through the flood and drain grow beds and other water features.

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This rock tank was built for the fig tree, however I am seeing the need for an additional water reservoir.

I’ll have a drain off the bottom of the pond which will flow when the water reaches a specified level via a pipe set just below the water line. Right now there is a 2″ pipe which leads to the radial flow filter and after that a biofilter. Additionally I’ll have another outlet for water off the same bottom of the pond level inlet pipe which I’m now considering running directly to the sump tank. That pipe will offer another 2″ perhaps more of flow (I have not built the pond wall up to full height on that side yet) so I can make it whatever size I need.

This way I’ll have two gravity feed overflow pipes on the fish pond.

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the pond I am guessing is around 1000 gallons the sump will only be 300 gallons because of its proximity to the overflow level of the pond outlets.
FYI: We just measured from the bottom of the fish pond to the ceiling 13 feet! Pretty good considering the ceiling can be easily reached from the boardwalk.

Hi Brian,

You live in a harsh but beautiful environment. A ground dug aquaponics greenhouse that you are building would be a great fit to your and your wife's daily living. A constant supply of green vegetables thoughtout year.
It looks like greenhouse needs some insulation too. So much to do yet. I would love to see it completed.

Sejin
South Australia

Thanks Sejin, yes a pond is in sight, which makes it harder to do this preliminary building. I hooked up with the friend who'll build the aquarium window for us. I've already got the one foot by two foot 3/4 inch thick plexiglass which my cabinet maker buddy will frame in with two inch thick Ipe http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/ipe/. The idea is to keep the plastic centered in the rock wall of the FT/pond hopefully providing better viewing area. I wish I could have bought a bigger piece of plexiglass, but that stuff is expensive. Well so is the Ipe wood and carpentering. I'm supporting my crafty friends this way

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Good Morning, indeed.

I like doing my newsletter on Thursday morning, especially with Nell home with me. I know, I’m such a show off. It is a fact that companionship makes work feel more rewarding.

We started the day looking for a live wire tester. Never did find it, even after looking in all the usual places. We did take the opportunity to clean out the drawers of my desk, and a couple others as well. There is still some work to do.Our kitchen table is covered with “stuff” from my desk. Most of the junk in my drawers is just that, we found a few relics, a few useful items, which I kind of knew were in the desk, but the rest is currently unclassified and possibly destined for the round file.

No electric tester, I had to use my multimeter to ascertain what the problem with the three-way light switch I setup last weekend. It didn’t take long after I pulled all the outlets and switches to see where the issue was. In fact I decided early on that I’d move the GFCI outlet to the end of the circuit instead of the beginning to see if that simplification helped: Nope. I guess I need to revise that,”It didn’t take long,” statement. It wasn’t until I (my ego, that is) broke down and drew out the circuit before I realized it was the travelers that were mucking up the circuit.

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Sorry I’m needing to plagiarize images off the Internet. Somewhere we own the NEC (National Electric Code) book, but hell if I could find that either. I’ve helped Nell define a new term for her book Housecleaning our Way to Enlightenment. “Lifestyle Process cleaning.” This happens when in the process of looking for something crucial to a project, everything else happens, similar to how life works. Hence the drawer cleaning duo working through sorting relics from crap we don’t need or want. Is lifestyle cleaning rewarding? Not in itself, but the adventure of it was, enlightening. The very nature of lifestyle cleaning requires de-cluttering. Holy moly, we’re massively cramped in this house. We have too much furniture for this little house. This is partially the result of talking Nell into letting me put off building the master bedroom and guest room. Except for the kitchen we live in one room, a long room, but one room nonetheless, the other is I should think that we’ve had a combined 120 years to collect stuff.

So,. the wiring diagram above was what I intended to build for the greenhouse with the added feature of a GFCI outlet by the door to the outside so we can run power tools and perhaps a pump for the fish tank if I can ever get back to working on the tank. I had all those wires, I thought. It wasn’t until as I may have already said, I drew the mess out on a piece of paper that I saw the problem. That outlet over by the outside door didn’t have a power source.

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What these circuits don’t have is an extra wire for a constant power outlet, doh.

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That red line and the black line between the switches they are the travelers. Those are what give either switch the ability to turn the lights on or off. Besides the outlet which I completely forgot to have a wire for, there are also two lights at different locations. Somehow I needed to retrofit, Jesus that word is not my friend, two single wires one from the power source, one red switched wire from light to light, bingo!

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Well now that’s my lil’ ol’ story as I head back to finish off the week working for Desertgate.

I’ve got projects lined up that are going to require my attention and all I want to do is finish the pond and fill it with water. For example. the front drive shaft on the Jeep it turns out is what was causing the clicking sound after the wheel fiasco before my surgery. I haven’t been under the Jeep except to change the oil, because there is a big fat truck in the shop that also needs serious attention. If I could make a wish as far as our vehicles go right now, it would be that the Dodge got a brand new fuel injection pump installed and it was sitting outside the friggin shop waiting for me to hop in it and go for loads of gravel for the damn driveway and a half dozen other uses I planed for it when I posited that spending $2000 on a dump bed for it was a smart move.

Lifestyle cleaning.

Sincerely, Brian Rodgers

BMN_Presby-Mission-Church-me-&-steeple
Good Morning and holy crap I’m glad it is Friday.

Can’t you tell? That’s quite an expression I’ve got going there. I think the sun was in my face. Hoeboy, it was a hot one yesterday, I think it was upper 60s like 67 degrees in the sun. I’ve got to dress in layers or I’m toast. I was fighting the urge to clam crawl across that roof and get in the steeple. I mean fighting it. If it wasn’t cedar shake I would have, but I couldn’t take the chance that I’d break something. It was tugging at me, pulling me now just looking at the picture. Sheesh!

This weekend I’ve got so much planned I feel over loaded. Luckily, life marches on and whatever I don’t get done this weekend will need to wait for next weekend. Just like that steeple, I’m drawn to water. I can not begin to tell you how much I want to fill the pond with water and start cycling the water. Oh have I not mentioned cycling fish tank water? Yep, we can’t just fill the pond and put fish in there, they’d die for certain. Cycling is done to get the water to the proper pH and ammonia several other points of reference I hadn’t begun to research since I’m so far from that stage as yet.

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Yep, whole-nother aspect, which thanks to an arduous work ethic is finally on the horizon

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an RFF filter is a radial flow filter often constructed of materials found around the house, separates fish waste, poo and uneaten food and pretty much anything that settles to the bottom of the fish tank, from the water. Optimally, the waste is separated with little or no disturbance. This means the solids can’t go through a pump impeller. If the solids get stirred into the water it is more difficult to remove the ammonia. The RFF gets its name because the unpumped inlet is set at an angle to create a gentle cyclonic flow in a barrel or in this case of the water cooler bottle. Some solids sink right away, others try to float but the RFF has a bottle of some kind half sunk in the water so floaters can’t easily get to the outlet.

You may be able to see the upside-down soda bottle in the cooler bottle, that is the floater blocker. Looks kind of lame, but these things work great, and best of all, they’re DIY.

One item I see over and over in the Aquaponics forum is that these systems are continually being upgraded. Good research and a well thought out plan help, but I’ll need to be ready to change any thing and every thing that leaks or generally isn’t working and be prepared to do so immediately or the fish will suffer. So for now at this point in the engineering my best hope for success is to leave room to get to the filters, tanks, pipes and everything I can think of so when I have to swap something out I can without fighting space restrictions, pipe sizing restrictions, whatever. This I hope is where my research will pay off, and try not to paint myself into a corner right off the bat.

2013-02-17 Air lines insulated
Another gorgeous system in gorgeous Australia.

Why do I do this to myself. As if that steeple wasn’t alluring enough?

Have a great weekend, I know we will

Brian Rodgers
P.S. sorry I didn't give credit for the pics where it was due. Y'all know who they belong to and I thank you

Brian,

A RFF does not have a cyclonic flow. That would make it a swirl filter. Or at least a hybrid.

where does the name come from then?

RFF also known as RFS (radial flow settlers) get the Radial flow in their name from the water flowing from the radius to the edge of the containment vessel. It is better explained in this thread on Koiphen http://www.koiphen.com/forums/showthrea ... ow-Settler
Especially on the second page of the tread, but the whole thread is very useful.

thanks, I'll be sure to check that out. Right now, I've somehow convinced my wife to ride along on a building materials salvage trip.