Aquaponics New growbed flow control

I few days ago I created and installed all the required bits to control the way water enters and exits my growbed.

All this is probably overkill as a lot of people get away with just dumping water at one end, and draining from the other, but theres a fair chance that at some stage down the track I might try to make this system ultra low energy, so I thought Id design it so the water can move very freely through the browbed, and so it doesnt leave any areas that dont get enough flow. If I go low energy, that might mean low flow, so I designed it to what I think is the best way I could.

The plan is to have the water enter into a submerged pipe at one end of the bed that has a lot of holes in it, and exit via a similar, submerged pipe at the other end. This way the water will enter and exit evenly throughout the width of the growbed ensuring that no corners are left to go stagnant. With high flow, this wouldnt normally be a concern, but I wanted to make sure I had lots of options for the future.

After a bit of experimentation I discovered the quickest and easiest way to make holes in PVC pipe for water flow was with an angle grinder.

Just a normal metal cutting blade does a pretty clean job of cutting a lot of slots in a 90mm PVC pipe.

Just tap it onto the PVC quickly and it works a treat. A one second cut is perfect. Three seconds will burn it.






Slots are a must when using the clay balls for media as if you drilled holes, the balls would block them all.

All sized balls will block all sized holes regardless.

Go with slots.

The end result looks like this and only takes around 5 minutes per meter at most.

I cleaned it up with a little sand paper and added end caps and an elbow.

I cut a hole with a hole saw so that I could add a stand pipe that would go through the elbow, then continue on through the growbed.

Theres no great need to make these joins exact because you want water to seep in all through this bit of kit.

I  found some fittings that for some reason have a tapered thread.

When I got them home, I found that the things they screw into dont, which is kind of strange.








The original idea was to cut a hole through the growbed, and screw the two pieces together from either side to lock the fittings on tight.

Because of the taper, I ended up just making the hole in the growbed really tight, and screwing the fitting in really hard so it cut its own thread into the growbed.

It seems solid enough.

This is what the finished drain looks like. This will drain water from the growbed back to the sump.

A pipe will be fit into the recess at the bottom, so that even though the water enters the drain from the bottom of the growbed, the water will exit the device at a bit lower than the top of the growbed.

I cut a hole with my hole saw into the bottom of the growbed.

This is an oddly scary thing to do.

Shiny new water tight containers dont lend themselves to be holed without causing some distress to the new owner.

I cut the hole slightly smaller than it needed to be, and then hand filed the rest so I could be sure of a very tight fit for the threaded component.

Once coaxed through the hole in the growbed, the standpipe was cut to size, and pressed into place without any glue.

Theres no need to glue it because if it leaks, water wont actually leave the system, and there might come a day when I want to adjust the level, or change the system from constant flood to an auto siphon or something.

The drain assembly looked like this when fitted.

The standpipe runs through the growbed on the left hand side.

The other end was completed in a similar manner, but this time with a central inlet because there was already a hole in that position.

This is where water will enter the system from the fishtank.

And thats it.

The growbed part of the system is complete.

Its worth adding plastic caps top the top of the inlet and outlet media guards to keep the clay balls from getting in when your digging around in the garden.





Like I said, its probably overkill to make the inlet and outlet pipes like I did here, but it should make it just that little bit more efficient.


120 Things In 20 Years isnt above pretending to make a new growbed when really I made it more than a week ago.

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Rocket Mass Stove

Ive mentioned this before, but this is such a neat way to heat that I wanted to make an entry just for Rocket Mass Stoves and include the best videos and links I have found.  

Paul Wheaton from Permies.com demonstrates in this first 2 minute video just how efficient the Rocket Mass Stove is.  You see this video frame here where this lady has her face over the flue pipe.  The heat and fumes from the flue are warm not hot and very clean.  I hope you will explore the videos at  Permies.com.  It is one of my favorite sites!

 

Efficiency is the key to heating a green house.

This simple low tech stove with exceptionally high efficiency is something anybody could build.

Why do we continue the spend thousands on air tight stoves that pollute and burn more wood?

http://tinygreenlove.blogspot.com/2012/02/amazing-rocket-mass-heater.html

Below is another favorite video educator.  Rob Torcellini shows the details of how he built a Rocket Mass Stove to heat his greenhouse.  The same stove could heat your house.

Add a self feed bin for pellets!  This is how Rob did it.

Rob has taken the Rocket Mass Stove to a very sophisticated level. His excellent engineering skills and preparations while building his green house have payed off well.

Hear are some more ideas

Ive included this video because it demonstrates the effectiveness of a rocket mass stove

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like youd know dude

Starting with today...my teacher for Psych 305 was talking about how men were the leaders of the house so they were used in commercials to promote sort of a..."Im telling you to do this cause Im a man" sort of thing even on a tampon commercial. Well she was like "cause youd know dude."

XD

And last night my Anthro teacher was talking about how a science person would view a philosopher. Its like they cant feel or see their theory. "Its like imagining pleasure...like mental masturbation."

XDD

Ugh I was walking home and it was lonely and cold. My fingers were freezing and I think I started having a panic attack. I hurried home but...i didnt want to really be there. Id rather be going to Adams bed...warm and cozy.

on my way home from the dark bus stop I walked alone. A man jumped out of the bush. He grabbed me and tried to rip off my shirt. I tackled him to the ground and tied him to a pole. I found a large knife in his pocket. I smiled and slipped off his pants. I shoved his pants in his mouth so he wouldnt scream. I wandered around the avenue and found a branch and placed it in between his legs. I picked up his testicle and slowly cut his skin. I pushed his testicle to the ground and gave it a quick whack with the blade. He tried to scream. I closed up his scrotum and did the same on the other side. WHACK. I pulled out my stapler and stapled his scrotum closed. I put his pants back on and walked away.

This is why I shouldnt walk home alone. I get crazy thoughts like this.

=]

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One Life Over Another

I have a problem with people

This seems to be the case clearly but this post isnt about a stupid boy or just specific people.  It is about a mindset.  People are selfish which is clear.
Lets start with Pro-Life because I know that will get people all angry anyway.  What is my issue with Pro-life?  I can tell you many people that are pro-life

• eat meat (and dont buy it locally) and/or locally grown eggs
• dont stand up for animal shelters (or even help them)
• cant walk in someone elses shoes

and while there are many other things, lets try to keep this blog "short" as possible.  I wont even touch stem cell research.

I dont understand people that are pro-life that think its ok to take the life of another animal.  Why?  Because it wasnt human?  What makes humans so great?  You can say it is for nourishment but what about veal?  It could have grown up but instead, we slaughtered it young.  On top of that, large scale meat farms abuse their animals.  Oh but thats ok because they arent human.  Who cares what hell a life must face?  It isnt human!  Farm fresh eggs are often fertilized by the way.  

Now what do shelters have to do with this?  In my county shelter (which is not high volume), there are at least 200 animals put to death for not being wanted.  Animals that come in and are early in their pregnancy often receive abortions.  Of course this is ok because they arent human.  Shelters do this because there arent enough homes.  Many human kids grow up in foster care or in an orphanage because there arent enough homes.  Of course, if people werent so pressured to have them....

Im not saying all of their parents should have aborted them.  I respect religions and all that but I DO NOT RESPECT PEOPLE THAT PUSH THEIR BELIEFS ONTO OTHERS.

A baby is a terrible punishment for someone that was careless.  Why?  Because it is likely the mother will either put it up for adoption (not getting her "punishment" at all) or never take care of the kid (and the kid is the one being punished.)  How many pro-life people have actually sat down and talked to people that were adopted/in foster care/in an orphanage?  Im "lucky" enough to have known my fair share.  I rarely hear good things about foster care (except that there are some good families) but have heard some goods and bads about adoption.  Not everyone adopting is doing it for the right reason.  Same with orphans.  "why wasnt I good enough to be adopted?"  Of course it isnt them, just most people have some funky suspicions about adopting older kids.  But the self esteem issues are the same in all of them whether the issue is big or teeny, or if the person is happy-go-lucky or not.

Now my other least favorite group - Vegetarians!

Ok so not all of em are bad.  My main issue with vegetarians isnt so much their diet but the why.  Why are they vegetarians?  I have a real big problem with the ones that do it for animal rights mostly because theyre so picky about what they eat.  Some eat fish, some eat poultry....some eat anything that isnt a mammal.  So what makes a mammal better than a fish or a bird?  

My hate for vegans is the same.  Again only the animal rights ones.  It is one thing to do it because animals are being hurt but avoiding all animal products...well...

• I never considered haircuts cruel so I guess that is my problem with vegans against wool.  
• Milk ducts can become swollen and painful.  Best to milk that cow/goat.
• birds will lay eggs whether you like it or not.  Many are not fertile unless you buy specific fertilized eggs.

And last but not least...religious haters!

Again I have no problem with religion...just those evil bastards that throw the bible at everyone and tell them theyre going to hell.  Newsflash, modern day interpretations of the bible are often wrong...so wrong that it has warped what the bible says and/or why it says it.  Lets take gays.  I cant say I love gays or hate them.  Why?  Well gosh darn it theyre people and some people I like and others, not so much.
I have heard a lot of them Christian folk say gays dont deserve to live.

But that fetus does....

So lets say a woman doesnt have an abortion because the bible says its wrong BUT the kid grows up to be gay.

Now it doesnt deserve to LIVE!!!!

A little info on religious books.  Back then, people were few.  People didnt have technology to save them from things like cancer and all that fun stuff.  When things like the flu swept through towns, it took out everyone but those strong enough to survive (AKA genetically strong enough to hold on.)  When God said dont waste your seed, it wasnt because he was not into gays or masturbation, but because there were some lack of babies being born.  However Im sure many people thought this was stupid at the time.  Back in those days, gay sex and masturbation were common because labor could easily kill your wife.  Herbal abortions were used for the same reason.  Were they common?  Nobody knows because it wasnt spoken of much.  Also just as a random note, virgin Mary wasnt a virgin at all.  Virgin simply meant young lady back in those days.  Today, virgin often means "not used" such as virgin trees (not recycled) or your virgin girlfriend (never had sex.)  The tree and the girlfriend can be as old as they want.  In fact, today virgin is also used with guys (such as 40 year old virgin.)

 

In general, I think we should respect all life.  People ask me why Im pro choice if I think we should respect all life.  In short, because I believe it is best culled before being abondoned.

What I mean is, abortions (unnatural, not miscarriage) is quite common in the animal kingdom, not just with people.  However many animals will just abandon their young when a mother feels that she cannot care for it.  We see this with people as well but make them feel terrible unless they put their child through the system (which is severely broken even in the best first world countries.)  Yeah I disagree with it but I disagree with suffering after birth more and disagree with the broken system/emotional issues even more than that.

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Aquaponics Over Flow

I wandered out to my system last night, and had what is commonly known as an HSM.

It must stand for Holy Ship Moment.

One of my grow beds was flooded, and there didnt seem to be any reason why.

This is the scene a few minutes after the pump was switched off.

There was water on the floor, and the pump was sucking in small air bubble through the little tornado that had formed in the shallow water over the pump inlet.

I couldnt figure out what was going on, so did a search of the system.

I found this blockage in the stand pipe.

It was stuck really well, but eventually to hammer it out with a length of dowel and a hammer.

The culprit, shown here, was a small piece of scoria.

This growbeds media is scoria.

I also found bird droppings. Im guessing a blackbird was in there throwing things around and looking for worms.

I do actually have an over flow pipe, added when I first built the little system, but the input flow from my bigger pump is much greater these days, so the little pipe wasnt up to the task.

Even so, its a good thing it was there because I think it saved the day by delaying the disaster until I discovered it.

Ill upgrade the pipe to cope with the new greater flow, and Ive put a PVC cap over the media guard so that particular issue cant happen again.





120 Things in 20 years think the last thing an aquaponics system needs is excitement when it comes to overflows.

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Aquaponics Flow meter

I got up in the night a week ago, went for a stroll through my house, and promptly fell over a lump of furniture nesting in my hallway. The last few weeks has seen us deciding that we really dont need a ... whatever you call that room with couches and a TV in your part of the world ... living room, lounge room... something like that if you speak English. Anyway, we decided we dont do enough "living" or "lounging" to really need a room dedicated to it, so we filled it full of floor to ceiling shelving, some desks and benches, and turned it into something more like a factory. A factory that doesnt actually produce anything, but does a heap of product development.

We figure when we want to entertain, well just do it at our guests house.

The result of all this that meandering about our house, is a river of transient furniture acting as flotsam and jetsam and nesting where it feels most comfortable, or simply where it last got stuck.

The result of that, is I tripped over an upturned thing with casters on the legs and impaled myself in the lower rib cage.

The next day I went to a doctor with a temperature of 39.7 c.

Who knew falling down gives you a temperature?  The doc thought I had ruptured my spleen so he suggested I go to hospital. The hospital decided I had three cracked ribs and pneumonia. A week later they finally disconnected all the feeding tubes, the morphine drip, and the catheter and let me go home.

The interesting upshot of all this, is that as a result of being given some kind of lung exercise device, I now have an excellent flow metre for my aquaponics system.


Which is nice.

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Filtering Poo with Continous Flow Media Bed

My indoor system started out with a gravel bed. After repairing a leak in the 45 mil EPDM liner of that grow bed, I decided to go with a Deep Water Culture (DWC) raft.  With only one 10 wall glazed my grow bed is 30"x10 long which is a rather small 25 sq ft..  I found it easier to utilize that precious space with a  raft system.

A panoramic view inside grow room.  800 gal fish tank on left grow bed on right

But loosing the large media bed meant that I would also lose the filtering capability of the 3/4" rock media.   So I decided to build a filter using evaporative cooler pads.   This works great at first, but after a few months the fish population began to grow and the fish got bigger.   The filter could no longer keep up with the poo.   Cleaning filters everyday was more work than I was willing to do.

So I decided to return part of the bed to a gravel media, and keep the rest as a DWC grow tank.

The DWC tank with gravel to the right of a plastic fence partition

I built a partition out of plastic fencing and PVC pipe.  Filled one side with 3/4" gravel and extended the return water pipe from the fish tank so that it dumps on top of the gravel.   One thing Id like to say about that is I also used 2" pipe rather than 1-1/4" because the smaller pipe tends to clog.

At this point I began to have concerns about a continuous flood gravel bed.  RupertofOZ was kind enough to dispel my fears by pointing me toward a very good experiment done by backyardaquaponics.com.  

.

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as coy as a fish

Not really...

Let me tell you something world...I LIKE GIRLS. I do. I mean not only girls (hence why I have a boyfriend) but yeah before him, I hit on waay more girls than guys. There is a good friend of mine. She is pretty (not bi or lesbian) but one thing I cannot stand about her is she makes decisions that get her into trouble and drinks...a lot. Tipsy every week at least is too much for me. I severely worry about all of my friends that drink. Even if I were totally into her, these two things (ESPECIALLY the drinking) would turn me off in a heartbeat.

So let me tell you about this girl. First she sleeps with a slut...a guy that practically sticks it in everything. Well whatever. Today she told me that she went to a party last weekend and made out with four people, one being the girlfriend of the guy she was fooling with. Seeing as there were speaks of a small porno with this girlfriend being in a lesbo scene, that didnt shock me one bit. What made me give a yuck face was the fact it was like an achievement to make out with four people in one night!

just my opinion...that isnt cool unless youre in an organized foursome/orgy.

But I still love her. BFF for life I guess.

Anyway...something I think is interesting.People hate on goldfish as pond fish because they poop a lot. Koi, however, are seen as beautiful pond fish that are never hated on. A bit racist I think. Koi will destroy your pond plants, goldfish wont. The only differences between the two? Koi is a pretty common carp while goldfish are pretty much a domestic carp. They are cheaper and most pond fish will grow only about a foot smaller than those koi things. Buut most people till see koi as better. This is a picture of my favorite type of goldfish called Shubunkin goldfish.

This is my favorite type of Koi which goes by butterfly koi (but also sometimes dragon koi or American koi)

Both start out around the same price and end up around the same price when theyre large. Both have long flowing fins. Difference? One will bond with you like a dog (koi) and the other wont destroy your pond plants.

I want my goldfish to be near my outdoor altar (whenever that happens.) I guess it is good goldfish arent as friendly because the last thing I want is to draw too many visitors to my private space. Koi? I might get those when I have children so we can enjoy the pond as a family. Call me backasswards but that means my goldfish will be my prized fish.

But what is prized shouldnt be based on race now should it?

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