Blogs

Taking One to Texas

I have been meaning to write a blog entry about taking the wind turbine to Texas for a number of years now, but for some reason just haven’t set aside the time. It has sat nearly blank in my blogspot account for 3 years. But here it is…and I will try to keep it short, with it being father’s day and me wanting to spend some time with the kids and work on the aquaponics projects…

Back in October of 2011 I made a solo trip to Texas with one of the two 10 foot wind turbines. An old high school friend named Christian Seger, and wife Lisa, were interested in flying it at their goat farm in Hempstead called…

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It was very exciting for me because I knew Christian would make
it happen. Christian is definitely “smart and gets things done“, and getting the wind turbine completely set up on a tower would not be easy. And, all I wanted was to find the wind turbine a home where it would actually be able to fly. Well it is now June of 2014 and it is up and running! Better late than never Christian!!!  😉
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Back in 2011, I had disassembled the wind turbine in preparation for the journey to Texas. I laid it delicately next to me across the passenger seat of my crappy old 1999 Nissan Sentra. The pieces filled the entire car and gave me just enough room to change gears. I think the wind turbine was far more technologically advanced than my old car actually.

I hate driving, but the trip was not too bad. It was nice to have some time to think and listen to music that I hadn’t heard for years. I think I turned it into a three or four day trip and combined it with a few client visits. I can’t seem to go to Houston without doing some business.

It was a great trip because we turned it into a pretty big get-together at the farm and invited a bunch of mutual friends still living in Houston.

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Christian showed us the boat he is (was?) building from scratch! An awesome project indeed. I wonder if that project is complete now?

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And, we unloaded and setup the wind turbine in Christian’s garage. Nothing was damaged on the trip and it went together as expected.

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Anyway, it was a great trip. It was great to see everybody and hand off the wind turbine, but it went by too quickly.  Now tree years later Christian has it up on a tower…where it should be. I am looking forward to seeing video of it spinning and see it flying in person some day.

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I also can’t wait to hear all the details about building and setting up the tower, which is a really big job. Not only a big job but dangerous too.

This makes me want to pull wind turbine number 2 out of the garage and get it set up somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. Maybe someday soon!! I think this blog may have one more entry in it’s future before it gets shut down!!!

Baby fish everywhere!

Well, it looks like my “all male” fish had babies! 🙂 I was starting to suspect that at least one of the six fish was female, judging from their behavior. And I guess that was the case.

Anyway, this is exciting because we can now eat these 6 adults and then start raising the babies. That seems a bit dark, but such is life I guess. The biggest was 14 inches and over 1.5 lbs. The meat was really good. We had fish tacos and the meat was less than one hour from the tank to our plates.

I set up a couple of 50 gallon tanks so I can separate the fish into similar sizes. It is obvious that more than half of the fish have already been eaten by their siblings. There are already a few fish that look like they have been eating very large meals…like other fish almost their same size!!! So, now I have a couple of other fish tanks to move fish into to keep this from happening. The growth rate differences between fry is pretty amazing. Not sure if the larger ones are males or just the “lucky” ones to grow slightly bigger so they could eat their brothers and sisters.

The 14 incher
The 14 incher

Heather with biggest fish
Heather with biggest fish

Big boy
Big boy

Big boy
Big boy

Decent sized filet
Decent sized filet

Using fish tank filters
Using fish tank filters

The basement is out of control
The basement is out of control

Lots of little fry
Lots of little fry

Lots of lettuce and iron deficiency

Quick update. Here it is my aquaponics system in August. The bottom image is just after a trim. As you can see, we’ve got lots of lettuce…this is enough for many days of salads.
I noticed a bit of yellowing that was obviously an iron deficiency, so I added some chelated iron to the system. Less than a teaspoon did the trick. They greened up really quickly after that…just a few days or so.
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Starting to get a lot of food!!

I haven’t figured out the pH / hardness issue exactly, but it doesn’t seem to be a real problem. I just get my calcium carbonate and potassium carbonate from a homebrew store for really cheap. I alternate adding one or the other with every other water top off. After experimenting, it appears to only take a couple tablespoons every few weeks to keep the water hardness above 40ppm. The pH stays at a constant 7.6, which the fish like, but I am sure this would not be the best pH for some plants. The mints, lettuces and basil seem to be perfectly happy with it though.

Here are a few pictures of it in June. I just keep giving it a trim and then it looks like this again 2 weeks later. We can hardly keep up eating enough salad and making enough pesto!!

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Starting tomatoes to transplant outside

We started some tomatoes from seed and kind of forgot about them!!! They got sort of big! We transplanted them to the outside raised bed garden and let them go. They didn’t all survive the transfer. I think it is a bit hard for the roots to go from an aquaponics system with no soil to being packed in soil. I think they would have done better if they were transferred while they were smaller. They still worked out pretty good, and we got some nice tomatoes off of them.
The fish are doing well and getting really big.
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Sample of what we are getting

Well, the system is working really well. The fish that was getting beat up didn’t make it, so we ate him….yummy. I added some PVC pipes to the tank so now they each have a cave to call home. They seem to have settled down and aren’t picking on each other any more.

We are growing a lot of herbs, basil, lettuces, etc. Here is what we are pulling out of the system about every 2 to 3 weeks. I just cut everything down about half way and let it grow back up…and repeat…

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Steady as she goes

It looks like everything is working pretty well. My IBC tote aquaponics system is humming right along without any real problems. I have one fish that is being beat up really badly by the others but I isolated him in another small tank and hope that he will pull through. Tilapia are some mean fish!

I am actually having one issue that is bugging me. The Denver City water that I am using for the fish tank has almost 0 kH (hardness from carbonates), which is a problem because the beneficial bacteria utilize carbonates for breaking down the ammonia to nitrite and then to nitrate, but without it can’t do this job. So, I  have been told to keep the carbonates above 40 ppm by adding calcium and potassium carbonate to the water. Well the problem is that this also brings the pH of the water up to about 7.6, which is not the ideal pH for the plants. Apparently, the pH should be quite a bit more acidic to really make for happy plants. Let me know if you know how to get the right carbonates and pH at the same time!!

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the system from a couple weeks ago. I recently switched the system from ebb and flow to constant flow and the plant growth took off. I didn’t expect that to make much difference at all but it is the only thing that has really changed…

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Starting my aquaponics system…

I just started an aquaponics system in my basement. I wanted to share this experiment so here it is. I plan on keeping at least tilapia in the fish tank and various herbs / vegetables in the grow bed.  I don’t have much time these days so I will  try to post as much information as I can but will probably not be extremely verbose…..just the facts. 🙂

Here are a few pictures…

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