Wednesday, November 18, 2009

A long overdue update


The last 6 months or so have been very busy for me as we have been in the process or upgrading our power supply big time. Many difficulties along the way with supply of bits. Plus the usual 1001 other jobs which need doing at the farm.
The new panels are above Phil and Ron. This picture shows an unusual weather event on 10th of October this year. Quite heavy snow for about an hour.
We have had a LOT of help from Ron Tito to accomplish this change. Actually Ron has been the driving force and without his advice and help the system upgrade wouldn't have happened.

And what has this got to do with Aquaponics you might ask?

Well..... it means lots of extra power to help me overcome some of the problems I have had with the Aquaponics systems.

The major problems I have encountered with the fish have been as simple as low water temperatures. Previous posts have detailed my efforts to get a sort of water heater going for the big fish tank. And to some degree (pun unintended) I have had some success. The lowest temperature in the big tank this winter was about 8 degrees and then only for a week or so. Last year it went down below 7 degrees and we had a couple of months below 10 degrees- and that killed all the catfish and most of the silver perch.
So the heaters worked vaguely as intended. I had to make a third one and I struggled with failing thermostatic control and cheap and nasty Rule bilge pumps but at least I haven't lost any of the fish. However another of the Rule pumps failed the other day and I decided to give up on that part of the heating system.
I have taken delivery today of 3 x 300 Watt Eheim aquarium heaters which I plan to put into the main tank in the very near future. These should be best quality if Eheim is as good as I remember from my Scullin aquarium days.
My crude calculations point to a 2 degree water temp increase for the input of 10 KwH of power. This was unthinkable before our power upgrade but we now have power to burn literally.
We have so much overcapacity now that the inverters are regulating power into the batteries as early as 10AM on most days. And we have a new wind turbine as well and wind turbines MUST have a load dump available so the fish tank will probably end up getting power from Jock as well.
Old wind turbine was Toby- a Swiss unit and Toblerone is Swiss- get it? Well Jock is a Proven wind turbine made in Scotland- so called Jock.

The other pics are of the plant growth at the moment. As you can see a bit of heat and things finally begin to grow again. We experimented with all sorts of supposedly winter plantings this year but the only things which can really cope are peas and silver beet. And the peas do really well so next winter we will probably plant all the beds to various types of them. The silver beet will stay as well as it just keeps powering on. These are now 2 year old plants which have provided a lot of chook food in that time.
We have let the lettuce go to seed just to see what happens. They grow too slowly to be much good to eat at this time of year and so the chooks benefit. They really love leggy lettuce.

And what of the big fish?
As usual I am unable to get good pictures and so you will have to believe me when I say that the biggest are probably more than 300mm long and ready to eat. I think I will try and catch them on a barbless hook. Only problem is I don't want to catch or hurt the smaller ones which are still only about 150mm long. There has been a huge variation in growth rates.

And what of the smaller system in the conservatory?
The higher minimums in this tank meant that the fish survived the winter but they haven't grown much. Now probably about 70-80mm long.
I think part of the limited growth we have experienced is due to my reluctance to feed as much as they might prefer. It has always been my philosophy that it is much better to underfeed than overfeed. Overfeeding is the quickest way to kill fish if any part of the system stumbles.

And a final pic of a fish which we found floating in the big dam in July of this year. It is a Murray Cod- about 600mm long and probably more than 10 years old. My nephew Ged gave me some mixed fish fingerlings quite a long time ago and I assume it was one of those. I was quite surprised to see this fish as we thought all the fish in the dam had died a couple of years ago when we had a big runoff event which made the water VERY muddy and probably suffocated the remaining fish.

3 comments:

Mr. Smiley said...

J & D

All this is very interesting but I can't get by the snow on the roof. I'm glad I moved from Canberra to Kuranda. no snow here--or rain for that matter. Very dry, but that will improve.

It's nice to beat the electrical company-even if it costs at first.

Great story.

D

gemmell said...

From what you're saying I reckon Canberra is a coupla degrees warmer than Burra in winter (which makes sense). My 3000L in the car port got as low as 6, but it wasn't in the shed like yours and had no extra heating of any kind. I also pumped overnight in order to stop the growbeds freezing (and all my bacteria dying) which would cool the water off even more.

Jim said...

Simon,
I am coming to the conclusion that even in the shed I am always going to have problems with low winter temps here. And low temps cause all sorts of other problems as you have discovered- the fish don't eat and the plants don't grow. It will be interesting to see if the new heaters make next winter worth the bother. As my power is "free" I can afford to use 10KwH per day but it would not be sensible if using 20c per KwH power.