Aquaponic Gardening

A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

Thank you everyone for coming and helping to fill the new grow beds.

 

All three grow beds filled in a matter of a couple hours with plenty of time for tours and questions (though I know everyone will have more questions now that they have driven home and thought of twelve other things they meant to ask.)

 

Seeing as I didn't manage to take any pictures while everyone was here.  I'll post some shots of the completed project but please feel free to post pictures from the work in progress.

 



Find more photos like this on Aquaponic Gardening

Views: 53

Replies to This Discussion

Great shots.

Question on the way home, what do you feed your fish?   I am sure red worms and BSF grubs, but do you get a fish food to supplement as well?

Also, who is Lou?   The Farmer near Invertness?  Trying to track down his handle on the forum.

 

Yep, I realized after people left that I had not shown off the fish feeders at all.  I feed the fish mostly Aquamax 4000 fish feed that I get from a feed store that is a purina dealer.  I have automatic fish feeders and you can find more info about them here

Fish Feeder Blog post

I even had one near to hand in the back yard there with a bucket over it and the question of feed and feeders didn't really come up.

Hi TCL, I was curious of how the updated system is coming a month out from the expansion. 

As I have been looking at some smaller PV solar systems lately, I was considering as to what would be needed to support a system such as yours.  Do you have specific info on the energy demands of your system?

I was also curious about the parts breakdown on the syllabus we received at the event.  I cannot locate the original paperwork and was hoping it would be in a format that you could email to me.  Once we move to our new property, I will, of course, have a gazillion more questions for you.

 

 

The pump on that system is a 50 watt Quite One 4000

 

The Air Pump I believe draws about 35 watts

 

Then there is the timer for the pump to be able to run the indexing valve which will draw a little bit, as will the timer on the fish feeder and the fish feeder itself.

 

Now If one were to modify the system to run continuous flood and be around to feed the fish daily by hand, the system could perhaps skip the air pump except during hot weather or spikes and probably give up the timer as well as the feeder so the system might simply be a 50 Watt system but I've not tested this idea with a heavy fish load.

 

When I tested that pump with the Kill-A-Watt meter it came up under 50 watts.

 

The system was doing very well until I went out of town this last time and it got cold while we were gone.  The fish feeder didn't know this and well, here is a link to the blog post.  Fish Kill This isn't the fault of the system, it is totally my fault for leaving the the feeder operational while out of town when it got too cold for the fish to eat.  I should have left them go hungry but when I checked the extended weather forecast before leaving, I thought it wasn't going to get that cold.

 

I still think this is a good system design but I expect that based on some Trials over at BYAP, I'm going to recommend that people run systems constant flood constant flow for the first 6-12 weeks of operation to speed up the cycling process and keep water quality good through the initial period.  Then around here during the cold months, I might switch back to constant flow/flood to help stabilize temperatures in such a small system.

 

Fish in the big system are still doing well and eating.

RSS

© 2024   Created by Sylvia Bernstein.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service