Seamaiden
Living dead girl
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Hee! Yep. You should see people's faces when I ask them how they like tokin' weed fed with pee.Have you ever used your pee on your plants? I have on outdoor plants. They appeared to enjoy it.
The old 'piss on your plants to fertilise them' trick, eh?
-- iCultivate --
We live in ranching country, lots of beef runnin' around out here. We'll be driving, Dave will point to a group of cattle on pasture. He'll say, "You see those cows over there?" I grunt. "They're outstanding in their field." Then he giggles while I roll my eyes and start giving him shit to come up with some new ones.
Fantastic! Great info- and the evidence of trials and troubles are as valuable as pictures of success. Helps a noob like me learn to recognize signs of things going awry in time.
I suspect that a well rounded mineral diet for the plants starts with the same thing for the fish?
What do you use for a biofilter/digester? I spoke with an experienced aquaponics operator locally, and he said that he installed a settling tank upstream of his biofilter and this helped keep his solids down to a manageable level. In his case, the system was heavily biased towards raising fish, as he didn't have a lot of plants growing in the system. I would bet that the higher the plants to fish ratio, the less trouble you'll have with excess solids.
I'm working on a very similar unit. PM me & I'll send you my NDA to give you an idea how it's very doable & more!Okay, so my plans involve a bigger system than yours, so those variables that change with scale will need careful attention. I want to place at least one, and perhaps two fish tanks outside, on the surface.
One of these will be a tilapia and warm water fish tank, to be run at 82F. It will be kept warm one of two ways; either a warm water circuit that flows between heater exchangers at the outlets if my sealed hoods and the water tank, thus warming it, using heat pulled from the lights to do it. This would substantially reduce the load on my chiller unit, allowing it to maintain the climate while using much less power.
The other more expensive but more efficient approach would be to install water cooling for my chillers, or replace them with a heat pump. These options call for the installation of a hot water circuit, to carry the heat generated by the heat pump away to be dissipated. Instead of throwing this heat away, however, I would use it to maintain a large hot water tank of 120+ gallons for the resident's decadent pleasure, lol, and supply a heat exchanger coil in the hot tub- for more of same, lol- and another coil to warm the fish tank, more to heat the entire house, and finally through a waste heat radiator for whatever heat might be left!
The other option is to run the fish tank at 55-65 degrees, with cold water species like trout in it. This water would be cooled by the chiller along with all the other RDWC, so it would require extra power to keep cool during hot summer days. There are jetpumps and other options for keeping the tank cool as well. Of course the tank would be insulated and shaded from direct sunlight to minimize such heat gain as much as possible. The payoff comes in the Winter time when that tank, sitting outside in Colorado, would freeze solid if left alone! Instead, the chiller coil continues to run, drawing heat out of the chiller system and maintaining the tank at temperatures very comfortable, even balmy, for the fish. This heat sink effect could also be increased with the use of jet pumps, fountains and the like. I can see a setup like this eliminating the need for several Tons of cooling capacity, and that's being very conservative considering it can get flat bone chilling cold around here!
I know this goes way above and beyond aquaponics, but I believe the promise of this dual approach is the free lunch you get by using each part of the system for multiple benefits. The tank(s) will still have fish, they will still eat fish food and create biosolid waste and ammonia, which will feed by gravity down into first a settling tank and then a big bio filtration bed- I like the worms, I'll get some, excess becomes fish food!- and then this water will flow through any of multiple RDWC I already use. From these, the water will drain into a big sump tank- think kiddie pool on the floor in the basement, lol- and a 1/2hp pump will push that water back up, outside, and into the fish tank to pick up more waste and solids and repeat its journey.
Ambitious? Yes... but how much more complexity am I introducing? A warm water circuit, which would eliminate the need for outside power for nearly any heating function on the premises- save actually baking the fresh fish in the oven!
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