Aquaponic Goblin Grow 2017

so here's my plan for wintertime growing

I'm not gonna flower till spring, and I'm thinking about letting these flower in the wilderness between our berry patch and our corn garden, option B is constructing a greenhouse https://emeraldkingdomgreenhouse.com with the auto blackout feature but the high winds we get scare me, $6500 for a 20x40 straight walled hoop house with the auto shades, $3700 for just the greenhouse without the shades

Anyway, the system is fed by rainwater with 110 gallons of reserve tank. The reserve tank fills the pump bucket which is rather small at about 10 gallons but will make sense by the end of this. The fish tanks are 2 20 gallon tall tanks, and drain through 1-1/2" PVC through bulkhead fittings I drilled into the sides. The top tank drains to the bottom tank through a cloning flow tube apparatus, and the bottom tank drains to the pump bucket. The pump is piped to two vertical sand filters that are cut and formed to accept bamboo cuttings or maybe I'll put strawberries in them....anyway the sand filters drain to the top fish tank. The pump also serves my patent pending "cascade bucket flood and drain system" basically once the first bucket reaches the frail fitting it autosyphons to the next bucket and so on and so forth. Using this method I can water many buckets while only actually pumping 5 or 6 gallons at a time.

Lights will just be 32w tube fluorescents for now...

 

I'm having a seizure over adding a gallery or how to upload pics to the new photographical librarius

And where's my signature? It's in my profile business...oh gods the world is awry

 

Ok, I got it...but for Pete's sake...the apple/flash BS.fuk is the camels poop of deserts...one pic at a time? Http://Apple.com/flashbullshit/corporateasshattedness/eatmyass.html <--------- clickbucket



Make a hole about the size of the diamond bit in a 2x4 or 1x4 Lightly clamp this jig to the outside of the tank in the location of the hole Put any kind of tape on the back side in several layers to keep the donut hole from falling into the bottom, you'll want to have your hand under this






I use 2nd gear and throttle it down half way or so, I drip water in the hole at the start and every 15 seconds or so. takes about 2 minutes on these





I apply silicone paste used for lubricating plastic filter assemblies in industrial applications to the gasket and plastic mating surfaces/threads of the bulkhead fitting prior to assembly and wipe off the excess once it's tight and marineRTV silicone for the pipe connections on the bulkhead fitting


This is the cloning station/conduit between upper tank drain and top of lower tank




This is a sand filter/bamboo cloning station

I used a heat gun (harbor freight $14 -fried after 2 hours) cut slots with a mini Milwaukee circular saw in 4" abs then heated up the pipe around the area and pushed on top and pulled on the bottom to create these pockets the wet sand shouldn't come out much







This is my invention, the gravity cavity bucket system ok prolly not but still it's goblinitious...once the first bucket is full, however many buckets there are will flood and drain









And this is the whole thing as of this am, the water is yucky because I put it through fresh hydroton, it'll clean up once everything's up and going, and my worms will love the clay particulates once the filter flushes into the worm farm sometime down the road








CRIPES, that was rather laborious

Happy Growin'

 

Doing this requires 2 accounts, to copy and paste from photo gallery efficiently, is there a workaround for this? I can't have two tabs logged in at the same time???

 

Well that's a bit easier, are these photos added via the quick reply box saved in a safe place or will they disappear down the road?

 

My girls/moms to be, supposedly guerilla glue #4 but I don't know for sure

 

Awwww, family pictures out in the sunshine

 

If its gorilla glue it will get the red/purple stems

 

This was about a week ago. I hurt my back maneuvering the old man and have been unable to lift heavy things...like my keys, or a screwdriver back on track now, still sore but today's my first day without enough painkillers to make reading comprehension like unraveling knot in spaghetti with a backhoe




This is the bottom tank, there's just goldfish and clams in here for now



This is the top tank, there's just micro organisms clams and mosses in here so far. This will be the shrimp/crayfish tank

 

these pics are so blurry, they are way zoomed in...I need one of those magnifier attachments for my phone.


This is today, one of the clams came out for some food




I got cherry shrimp and a blue crawdad yesterday. For free in the bag I also got some snails and several little tiny maybe shrimp babies...I've tried magnifying them but I can't make out any visible attributes to say what they are. But the move fast so I'm thinking they are more shrimp. They have been in for about 12 hours, so far so good



A weeeee little tiny cherry shrimp








Mr blue, the blue crayfish. This guy will get 6" long, so he will be going into one of the 300 gallon tanks, there will be a male and a female in each big tank

 

Lights and fan stuff arrived today

I ended up with a switchable HPS/MH 1kw in an 8" air cooled hood with an 8" eliscent fan with integrated speed control set to low and not really connected to the hood works fine for now... I'll get fittings and such at some point.

 

are you supplementing?

I still would love to figure out an automated way to have maxicrop run in a sep ressy to help correct some issues but only because it took forever to get the water clear from using it.

 

The only supplements I'm adding are phytoplankton and kill fish like fairy shrimp and clam shrimp and various copepods...I'm going totally dirty

This is just a veg setup to grow monsters to flower outside in spring

 

Holy crap...I was just sitting here, stoned of course, and I realized that I am the yurt toting frisbee chucking cheeba monkey of aquaponics. Metaphorically speaking, I am that chick that doesn't shave her pits and hasn't washed her nappy dreads in 14 years...not that I wouldn't use commercial products for supplementation,, if I did it would undoubtedly kill some random microscopic invertebrate that causes part of my system to crash, which causes everything to crash...and then the world crashes and then the universe crashes and then the dimensional rift crashes...OH MY GOD!

I'm not sure how I feel about being the only one i know creating a self contained ecosystem in their garage and it's not even my garage :smileys-passing-joint:

 

So I'm thinking all the little shrimps got through the tank piping into the goldfish tummies...

I swapped the top and bottom tanks because I was fucking with the crayfish tank too much, plus they like it dark...they're in a better place.

The tote is still emitting emulsified soy lecithin (soybean oil-ish).which isn't a bad thing I just don't want it coating all my hydroton and lava rock with goo. It's actually a medicine used in commercial fisheries so I know it's not gonna kill anything. the intermediary bucket stack between the tanks and the tote is a felt grow bag that's filtering out the majority of the particulates. Once it's clean enuf fer goverment werk, the goldfish wil be in there and the top tank will go back to being plants and phytoplanktons and other microscopic little critters, basically the feed stock for the fish and the crayfish. I feel terrible keeping the fishes pent up in such a crowded container but I think it's better for them than swimming through oily filmstuffs...thoughts?

Next to the bucket stack on the floor is my home made super duper air-o-clonermagicianry full of catnip cuttings

On the wooden plank in small pots I have my devils lettuce pink team and purple team leaders, I'm starting to train the stems to be clone factories

The stack of buckets on the wood shelf is my patent pending super duper self siphoning bucket system, containing one bucket of catnip rooted cuttings, one with a tomatoes plant that was forgotten about during the summer gardening expeditions, and one with a test gargantuan sugar beet - hopefully going to be the feedstock for my ethanol production apparatus.


That's all it in a nut shell...I guess I should note that no tank has a open hole below 80% as a safety feature, and the system pump timing is a function of how long it takes for 5 gallons to drain from the fish tanks back into the pump bucket on the lower left, which is about 45 min. Then the pumps float switch pumps ~5gallons back up to feed the auto siphon buckets, the tote, the vertical abs sand filter and the vertical abs planter thingie filled with hydroton, and the top fish tank which drains into the lower fish tank...and so own and so forthwith

And holy cow do goldfish like ground up shrimp bits...

Anawhooz

 

Purple team leader has split at the 5th set of leaves... SCORE!



I just twisting every few days & using the surrounding leaves to train the two apart for now





Pink team leader has developed nothing cool at all, so I took this opportunity to start the horizontal run, just twisting and bending every few days