Here is the statement I must disagree with.

Gator poop, and the alligators themselves, should be totally safe in an aquaponics system. Alligators are cold-blooded . . . → Read More: NO Gator Ponics is not as Safe as Aquaponics]]>

ACK. I don’t like to do this but…….. a popular aquaponics newsletter has just gone out with a statement I believe is dangerous so I have to speak up.

Here is the statement I must disagree with.

Gator poop, and the alligators themselves, should be totally safe in an aquaponics system. Alligators are cold-blooded animals, just like fish, and they don’t harbor the dangerous varieties of e. coli the way warm-blooded animals do. If what you feed the alligators is clean, and you don’t create any paths into your system that will transmit pathogens into the water (in other words, use the same care to prevent contamination you would with any normal aquaponics system you want to eat lettuce out of!), then everything should be sanitary and safe.

Come on Guys, e. coli is not the only food born pathogen we need to watch out for. Salmonella is something I don’t want in my salad either! Now while there are lots and lots of strains of salmonella and some might not make a healthy person too sick, there are others that constitute a terrible case of food poisoning. It is also true that you may be unlikely to catch salmonella from a wild lizard or gator just in passing, just like you won’t catch it from looking at chickens. Now if you handle those animals and then eat, smoke, or put your fingers in your mouth without washing your hands thoroughly first, then you can catch it. What does this mean for aquaponics using lizards or turtles instead of fish? Well it means you are contaminating the food with possibly salmonella tainted water by sending the feces laden water to your bio-filter and then on to your veggies. HAY, am I the only one who sees a problem with this? It is the same reason I don’t recommend chickens over your aquaponics system. And the Reason my Duck A Ponics doesn’t grow salad for human consumption. We grow things like banana trees in the duck system.

This really shocks me, the same people who claim worms are a pathogen danger and should never be added to an aquaponics system will recommend gatorponics? And say it’s sanitary and safe? WOW.

Here is one abstract I found with a quick google search “alligators and salmonella”
http://discover-decouvrir.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/article/?id=1296064

Now I don’t mean to be an alarmist because gator meat is less likely to test positive for salmonella than chicken but… don’t take salmonella lightly especially for young children, the elderly or those with compromised immune systems.
GATOR PONICS IS NOT Appropriate for growing Salad and other small leaf crops likely to be eaten RAW. I will admit that is just my opinion but I’ll stand by it unless there is some easy way to ensure a reptile is totally free of salmonella before putting it into the system (fecal analysis can provide false negatives so simply holding them separate for a few weeks while running a test on a fecal sample may not be enough. It might take months and rigorous sampling and testing to be fairly certain an animal is free of the bacteria.)
Now I’m not against the idea of Gator Ponics, However I wouldn’t grow salad with it or sell salad from the system. Some other produce would be more appropriate. Like perhaps something that gets thoroughly cooked before eaten or something where the fruit is quite distant from the water or perhaps something that is not a food but useful for some other purpose.

Refers to adding a carbonate buffer to the water that will keep the pH from dropping too low or buffer the pH up.

Common buffers include calcium carbonate (lime or shells or chicken grit) or potassium bicarbonate (find it at brew and wine making supply places) The calcium carbonate provides . . . → Read More: Buffering the water up]]>

Buffering the water up

Refers to adding a carbonate buffer to the water that will keep the pH from dropping too low or buffer the pH up.

Common buffers include calcium carbonate (lime or shells or chicken grit) or potassium bicarbonate (find it at brew and wine making supply places) The calcium carbonate provides calcium while providing the needed alkalinity to the bacteria and potassium bicarbonate does the same while providing potassium instead of calcium.

There are also pH up methods that are far more alkaline and fast acting and must be treated with caution but it is what the big boys use at the University of the Virgin Islands. That would be Calcium Hydroxide (hydrated lime) and Potassium Hydroxide (old fashion Lye). These are both caustic substances and must be handled with care and proper protective equipment but they still work to keep pH up and provide calcium and potassium.

It’s like some one saying you HAVE to sink your fish tank into the ground to keep it warm enough for tilapia. While this might be accurate for a . . . → Read More: The Dangers of Absolutes]]>

I’ve noticed it is tempting to oversimplify aquaponics by using absolute statements. However, strong absolute statements without any qualifiers tend to be inaccurate and misleading.

It’s like some one saying you HAVE to sink your fish tank into the ground to keep it warm enough for tilapia. While this might be accurate for a particular system in say Florida, it won’t be helpful to some one in a temperate climate where the ground temperature would actually be too cold for tilapia.

Aquaponics is simple but there are lots of details and they do say the devil is in the details.

For example, some people will tell you never to use salt because it will kill your plants and fish. Well I must say you can kill your plants and fish if you were to keep adding salt to your system on a regular basis, however, I have on rare occasion used salt and it hasn’t killed my system. In fact over time plants do slowly use up the salt and after several months the salt level will drop from 3 ppt down to way less than 1 ppt in my system. But here is an important detail, my source water doesn’t have much if any salinity to affect it. If you are in a location with saltier tap water or well water, you may be adding salt just by adding water. Now perhaps some of these people who will use the absolute that you should NEVER let Salt near your Aquaponics System, come from a place where the water could be saltier (like maybe an island.) In their situation perhaps the natural concentration of salt building up in their system could be high enough that adding any extra salt would be causing an overload so knowing a bit about your source water is important.

Salt is not the only detail where knowing more about your source water could be important.

For instance, Potassium or the use of potassium bicarbonate. On a tropical island in the sea, potassium may also be more abundant in the source water along with salt. So using potassium bicarbonate in that situation might not be appropriate. However, many people in more inland situations have experienced potassium deficiencies along with the need to regularly buffer the pH in their systems up.

So, before you go believing that there are all these absolute rules to aquaponics, do a bit more reading since for almost every absolute rule I’ve heard of, I’ve also seen instances of where that rule was broken without ill effects.

The most important rules I know of with aquaponics are that you need to support the bacteria. A bio-ponics system can function without the plants or fish for a time but the Bacteria are necessary for all of it. If the bio-filter isn’t there none of it works. Your stocking needs to be appropriate to your filtration. The bacteria and filtration are the most important part of the whole system. If that works, the plants and fish are usually happy.

Anyway, when you fill a container from the faucet or the hose with water and immediately test the pH, you will probably . . . → Read More: pH and Tap water]]>

I point out this bit constantly online, don’t feel bad if you didn’t know it, I didn’t understand it in the beginning either and really got frustrated with hydroponics because of it.

Anyway, when you fill a container from the faucet or the hose with water and immediately test the pH, you will probably get a false low pH reading.
WHY?
Because of trapped CO2 in the water. Dissolved CO2 acts as a weak acid (carbonic acid I believe.) Once this CO2 has time to off gas (you can aerate it out like you would with chlorine but this effect with the CO2 happens in well water as well as in city water) the real pH of the water can be seen.

Back when I was doing hydroponics I had a terrible time because I didn’t know about this and no on on the Hydroponic forums I was on shared the info. Anyway, I would test my tap water or well water pH and it would read 7. Well that seemed pretty good since I knew my nutrient mix would lower the pH even more so cool. Then I would mix it all up and get things going and before I knew it, the pH would be up way over 7????? What the heck? I didn’t get it.

I will take a moment to caution here about the use of pH meters too. They are not always reliable and need to be checked, calibrated, cleaned, maintained and stored properly. This usually takes solutions for each of these steps that you have to buy separately so please don’t assume that a pH meter will save you money in the long run because you don’t have to keep buying the test strips or test solutions since you are simply trading the test solutions for calibration and storage and buffer solutions instead as well as replacement batteries and replacement elements for the meter. If something seems off with the pH meter, you should have an additional means of checking pH so you can compare. I had a pH meter fail but I kept trusting it and adding more pH down and more pH down and more and more before I realized that the meter had quit working by which point the nutrient mix was trash with a pH below 4 and I had wasted most of the bottle of pH down. Now that incident was back in my days of hydroponics.

I will say that had that incident occurred in an aquaponics system, it would likely have killed fish and the bio-filter bacteria as well. If something seems off, stop double check things and ask for help, there are online forums with plenty of people willing to offer advice and perhaps tip you to an idea or issue you hadn’t thought of.

So once you decide you need a sump tank, you then need to figure out how big it needs to be.

Start out by figuring out the total volume of all the flood and drain Media grow beds . . . → Read More: How to Size Your Sump Tank]]>

Aquaponics Sump tank, Why?
Either to deal with water level fluctuations or gravity drains or both.

So once you decide you need a sump tank, you then need to figure out how big it needs to be.

Start out by figuring out the total volume of all the flood and drain Media grow beds you need to handle flooding and draining at the same time. Then you figure that your media will displace about half the volume of those beds (it will actually displace more but we want to have some extra sump volume so go with 50% since it makes the math easier anyway. Us some volume calculator on the web if you need to figure from cubic inches or feed into gallons or liters and then figure out the total volume needed.

So if you have 1000 gallons of grow beds total and figure that leaves needing about 500 gallons of sump tank volume to handle flooding the beds all at once, then you should look for a sump tank that will hold at least 500 gallon but I often recommend going about 10% extra just so you have some added depth for your pump to operate (most can’t pump a tank down to dry ya know) and it’s kinda handy to also install a float controlled top up valve just below the normal low water level but above the pump overheating or sucking air level.

This calculation works well in basic systems but keep in mind that a nearly empty sump tank sunk into the ground in a greenhouse while there is a downpour all around might have a tendency to float out of the hole, this can do quite a bit of damage to the plumbing and the hole as well as create a HSM (heart stopping moment) when the owner of the aquaponics system discovers the damage. Also very shallow but large footprint sumps might be easier to fit under grow beds without digging them into a hole but they will also not provide much depth for the pump to work in and there for may need to be even larger to accommodate the operational depth of most pumps.

Please be patient with me these first . . . → Read More: Aquaponic Lynx LLC Newsletter]]>

I’m finally setting it up. The Aquaponic Lynx LLC Newsletter. Not that I know what I’m going to write in it yet but I’ve set up the Newsletter subscription plug in so if you wan to be notified when I start writing the Aquaponics Newsletters, please subscribe.

Please be patient with me these first several weeks as I am too busy to really do this right instantly, but people have asked so I’ll try to deliver. I figure it is better to get started and improve as we go along rather than stalling out because I can’t choose a design (Hum, kinda like when building an aquaponics system isn’t it? Some design and planning is important but don’t let it stop you from getting started.)

Aquaponics is such a huge subject so we should be able to find something to share regularly.

I expect I will start off mainly with announcements and information about the products I have available for aquaponics and gardening and move on to covering basics about small topics and telling stories, ya know, like blog posts and other newsletters I guess.

Finally I expect I will use the newsletters to make the announcements about any Farm Tours (like after I get the new farm set up) and where my aquaponic produce will be at market.

So please sign up if you are interested. It is a double opt in so you will need to go to a link in an e-mail that will be sent to you after you sign up. Please type your e-mail address carefully.

You may unsubscribe at any time using the unsubscribe link in the e-mails

Very exciting but it will likely take a couple months to get . . . → Read More: TCLynx Bought The Farm]]>

It’s official, Really, She Bought a 12 acre Farm, gonna go live in the Barn and set up a fish farm.

So Aquaponic Lynx the farm will be moving about 17 miles to the west of where the Residential farm is now.

Very exciting but it will likely take a couple months to get totally moved and up and running at the new property. This weekend is probably the last good chance for tours at the current location in Tangerine. So Easter Sunday Farm tours at the old place in Tangerine.
Come summer I’ll be doing farm tours at the new Place over in Yalaha, FL once we get set up.

It has been a rough past two weeks trying to get the deal on the property closed. The village idiots at BOA kept loosing paperwork and asking for extensions on the closing (and yet if I were to delay the closing for any reason they would have charged me by the day.)

Anyway, I’ll be working hard getting the place habitable and ready for the aquaponics and other animals to move over. So much to move, so little time. Stay tuned for updates and the announcement about the first farm tours (which probably won’t be till Late May or June.)

One of my favorite things about the place (besides it being a nice chunk of agricultural land) is the steel roof to collect rain water off of. I should be able to run the systems with only minimal well water if I can get a bit rain water storage tank (or a couple of them.)

Anyway, that’s the big news. Aquaponic Lynx LLC will have a new home and enough space and the right zoning to be able to run a semi commercial auqpaonics operation without the neighbors constantly causing me code enforcement issues. Just around the corner are a produce stand, a BBQ place, and a bakery that may be the perfect outlets for some of the local produce and fish.

valve controller quick bang up prototype

Definitely nothing fancy. Now I have not worked out any elegant way to be able to change the programing in the field so if I made one . . . → Read More: Valve controllers]]>

Ok, I can do it. Make a controller for the automatic diversion valves (and thus the indexing valves as well.)

valve controller quick bang up prototype

Definitely nothing fancy. Now I have not worked out any elegant way to be able to change the programing in the field so if I made one of these for you, I would need to know what sort of timing schedule you wanted so I could pre program it. Right now my prototype is running 5 minutes per side.

I still need to work up the price for one of these.

Let me know what you might be willing to pay for it seeing as to do it without a custom made control requires some form of repeat cycle timer, a power supply to plug into the timer to control a spdt relay that can control switching the 24VAC power supply to the different sides of the actuator.
So the cost for the above listed parts for me was
$75-$85 for a repeat cycle timer
$16 for 24VAC power supply for actuator
$12 for 12VDC power supply to switch the relay
$5 for relay
$2.19 for circuit board
$10 for wire, tape, solder etc and bucket to put over it all to keep rain from frying the non outdoor electronics that I couldn’t fit into a box.
Total $120.19-$130.19 (and that doesn’t include the price of the soldering iron or other tools needed for doing electronics, nor the shipping or taxes on those materials, let alone the time to figure it all out or the trial and error and education along the way.) So what I’m saying is if you want to just fudge it on your own, you probably can with the above listed inelegant bundle of parts. This would be far more appropriate to indoors where you wont’ be worried about it getting rained on.

Now if one wanted to build their own, they are not especially complex and the programing board isn’t especially costly because it is based on the PICAXE 08M chip and the software is free and there are free forums that can teach how to use them. I am estimating the cost to build one of these yourself (if you already have the tools for soldering and playing with electronics) to be around $110 including the nice weather resistant box.

I’m currently in the process of sourcing parts so I can put together more of the above pictured basic timers but these will be very basic just meant for timing the diversion valves. If you want any additional features or control I will recommend the Bigelow Brook Farm IX Series Sequencing Timer