Today, the update is about the progress of my little homemade aquaponic growth vegetables.
Firstly, there had been a failure to anticipate how tall the plants can grow and the strength of the winds.
Let me show you the current photos of the vegetables.
Top Bucket 29 Mar 2009
Bottom Bucket 29 Mar 09
You can see the Bottom Bucket had half of the vegetable was gone due to my own fault, the plants got too tall and fell sideways touching the water that is coming down from the hoses.
The end result is death to all my “kang kong” vegetables, I was devastated at first then realized the top bucket is suffering from the same problem of weak stems and need some sticks to support them individually.
I uses some old wooden chopsticks & small wire to tie them upright to prevent them from falling over, the result of the rescue is the photo above on the top bucket.
Those on the top bucket is majority are “ladyfingers” vegetable and a small number of them are “chili padi”.
I will continue to update on this project and hopefully able to harvest them…but I am not experienced enough to know if they are ripe for harvest…any advice will be helpful!
Today’s update will be a basic setup of my copper pipes to condense the steam and a clearer explanation on how the steam may be sucked into the pipe
The Fresnel Lens is up and ready to use the sun as ‘Death Ray’ against anything in it’s path and that includes instantaneously vaporizing water into steam!
The above video was taken just now after like 2 hours of pipe works and brainstorming on how to place the pipes.
I believe in improving the project as time passes so that I can solve any kinds of problems possible to achieve the result of getting distilled water faster than any other solar distillation projects.
This is a my new project on Solar Water Distillation, I had seen many distillation projects out there that are not very efficient in creating pure distill water.
This project is to have a high target of distilling lot’s of water in the shortest possible amount of time.
Idea is very simple, use a big lens to concentrate the sun light onto a small frying pan and drip rain water or drain water or any water onto the frying pan. The resulted steam will be sucked into a copper pipe above and it should go through a series of copper pipes to cool down and condense the steam into pure distilled water.
The setup is relatively simple…but I haven’t got all the stuff yet…this is a video on the list of items that I had acquired over a period of 2 weeks.
7 March 2009 Night
PVC Stand
I had completed the base of the stand and the holder of the Fresnel Lens to be able to turn vertically and horizontally.
Fresnel Lens Holder
I currently faced the problem of mounting the holder to the base of the PVC stand…I need to get more L-Brackets to tie down to the stand and mount the holder down with screws.
The rest is still work in progress hence not updated here yet but soon it will be up!
I had modified the double barrel fish protector filter for my water pump to point upwards instead so that there won’t have any possible chance of over flowing anywhere since the amount of water are limited to the water level above the barrels.
My molly fishes had actually given birth to many small babies!! ^_^
I fed them 2 times daily with algae wafer and they seems to be flourishing well
More updates will be found in my project page of this blog!
The DIY Indoor Aquaponic Growth System status report on the growth of my vegetable garden. 1. Kang Kong is growing up pretty fast… 2. Xiao Bai Cai is spreading all over the place Let me write a small review on this setup and the problems encountered & unsolved problems. Aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics and Aquatic fish breeding to make a 90% to 100% maintenance free. The benefits of my set up is as follows
Save lot’s of space
Able to plant vegetables indoor
The vegetables can be sheltered from extreme weather such as winter, hurricane, drought and etc.
Scalable expansion depending on your building weight limits on the floors.
Can be used outdoors as well
Quite hassle free, just need to feed the fish…the rest is automatic. (Maybe get an auto feeder!)
Almost “Free” Food
Fish waste as fertilizers means it’s Organic vegetables (No pesticides or natural gas fertilizers)
The disavantages are
Slightly expensive to setup initially especially during trial and error
Need some knowledge on fish breeding
Troublesome to build if you are unable to gather all the components.
There are some problems that I had encountered previously during the set up process and mistakes made that cost me some money to replace the “Ikea Snail Buckets” because I had drilled holes into the bucket wrongly making the set up noisy and very annoying.
First problem that I had faced was the noise, the splashing noise can be heard from the next room if there was no stone pebbles inside the buckets. After reviewing some other people’s setup such as ninamichelle77‘s video on her Aquaponics System,
I had decided to follow her hose design with slight modification. Then the second problem is the water pump sucking fishes into it’s “final destination” and end up in heaven, I managed to connect a “fish protector” from the pump to prevent small fish from premature death ^_^.
The third problem is the risk of clogging at the drainage hole (hose connector) inside the bucket from small pebbles, I managed to find a small tea strainer to cover up the hole to prevent any small stones from clogging the opening and able to cover the whole strainer with stones without clogging!
The fourth problem is the loud drainage noise that happens every time when the water flow is large hence I installed a valve to the setup to control the flow of water and the noise just disappeared!
The current pending problem is the top bucket is still not very well irrigated which probably delayed some of the growth, I am still thinking of ways to improve the water flow and currently testing if lowering the platform can slow the water flow and irrigate the top bucket better.
The plants is doing great and the molly fishes are doing rather well in the tank The wild common mollies are very good jumpers hence I had to cover the top part of the fish tank using some plastic cut out cover but still 1 or 2 still jumps out occasionally at some small openings…but it’s not a serious problem for now.
The common mollies love algae wafer & flake fish food hence I have no problem breeding them but I will love to get my hands on a tilapia (Japanese fish) this weekend if possible but I know recently the weather is terribly hot causing many fishes to die in the drains…saw a few floating tilapia last weekend!
Ok, that’s all for today’s update…stay tune for my next update probably a few more days before I post again on this project. My next project might be very interesting, it might be a project on water & sun…stay tuned!
Found this video very educational on D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) food growing or gardening indoor, this can be a very potential way to grow food indoor regardless of land space.
If you have a living room full of concrete, why not try this to grow some nice vegetables & it also great for rearing fish too!
The video is from gardengirltv.com which I believe will help many people out there who wants to prepare for sustainability indoor but don’t know how.
GREAT BARRINGTON — Robert Kelly smiles when you call him a tinkerer. The evidence is plain to see.
Inside the kitchen of Kelly’s home, a converted school house built in the late 18th century, is a large island with a granite countertop that is located in the middle of the room.
“That was last year’s project,” Kelly says.
Outside his house are large piles of wood, fuel for the wood stove he plans to install. Walk over to the garage, and you’ll see Kelly’s latest project, one that took all summer.
- This guy D.I.Y. himself an ELECTRIC Car!! How cool is that!? This is another example of great project for people to look forward to…
Electric car is great for countries that have cheap electricity or uses renewable energy…many people may be thinking of it but dare not start this project.
It’s about time someone shows how simple it is to convert a gas powered car to electric car….too bad this news don’t show the step by step instructions….on how to do it
ROME, ITALY – A GROUP of Italian biodiesel producers said on Wednesday they have begun a project to move away from using food crops for fuel by using seaweed instead.
Eight companies that already produce diesel from crops like maize and rapeseed are involved in the 10 million euro (S$20 million) project, which they hope will produce fuel from seaweed on a commercial basis within five years.
‘The initiative aims to substitute or integrate the raw material used today (cereals) with another which does not compete with crop cultivation,’ said Vice-President of Italy’s Union of Biodiesel Producers, Pier Giuseppe Polla.
The group said it is working with scientists at the University of Florence to choose a seaweed species that will be grown in plastic tubes of seawater and fed with carbon dioxide captured from thermal power stations.
The group said it expects to have established the process in two years and will begin building a plant at a coastal location, probably in southern Italy.
The plant should be producing diesel within five years from now.
- Bio diesel from seaweed may be one way of creating free source of fuel but do remind them that these seaweed should not and CANNOT be cultivated in the sea as it may create “dead zones” where all the oxygen are used by the seaweed a night sucking the life out of the sea life.
If a river full of fishes are replaced with seaweed, the result is a gradual reduction of fishes and other sea creatures in the river’s “dead zones”.
This must be done in a specially created pond that is similar to a aquarium that required to be bubbled and fed with carbon dioxide in the day with great sunlight for proper photosynthesis to happen.
This may or may not replace the usage of oil totally but any percentage is welcome without disrupting the cost of food stuff. This is one of the “non-conventional” fuel that may make some profit when oil prices goes above certain price….
Watch out for more renewable energy over the horizon to spring out soon!
I had found one of these really neat DIY renewable project that is cheap to make and possible to enhance in the design to produce a much more electricity for free!!
This project instruction is posted at instructables.com so that you can follow his examples and start creating renewable energy right away.
I will try to emulate his project as soon as possible when I finish another bottle of Pringles potato chips!! If possible, I hope to enhance it further to produce more electricity to charge my home sealed lead acid batteries to power my Eee-Pc mini-Notebook that uses only 9.5 volts.
This is simply amazing DIY guide for people who have the heart to build their own renewable energy.
I had been pondering about renewable energy for sometime… trying out many ways to make renewable energy. My procrastination had reached it’s limit and it’s about time I search the world wide web for DIY Renewable energy.
Hopefully I can get some feedback by readers like you on the following links that i had managed to find. If they are worthy of “our” time to invest time, money and effort on those projects.
If you are interested to do your own renewable energy projects, do take serious precautions on the electricity shock prevention.
Do comment which website(s) that you find interesting, add others if any. (Note: I haven’t 100% gone through all the sites yet..hee)
