what it actually is is a wastewater treatment plant scaled to a single house/apt. That's effectively it. It converts fish and shrimp and snail poop into food. Would I personally crap in it? gently caress no. Yes you could probably get better results making it into a huge thing that is so big it can easily buffer and recombobulate whatever you like into whatever plants you want, but if you can run it with less buffer and still make it effective you're also running a system that puts out less pollution in general. Also putting in any yard waste is something that you need to be careful about because of weird sprays from your neighbors or whatever. You may also end up depleting your soil over time, as more and more gets pulled, goes thru the tank into your food, and then down your toilet. If you can run a system "stripped," with so much nutrient demand that it immediately sucks up all dissolved nutrients, that could be really useful for a saltwater aquarium, you'd sorta just need to check up on dissolved minerals and make sure that isn't getting hosed up. In this use you'd have more leeway with feeding your critters and accidentally overfeeding them would be maybe not such a big deal. Assuming your plants are able to immediately export any excess. loving around with water changes was a huge pain in the rear end, and other than "huge fuckoff size tank" you basically have to have some mechanism to deal with it. And gently caress buying giant heaps of aquarium salt, if you can just maintain what's in there, that would imo be way better.
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# ? Jul 25, 2023 14:13 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 00:39 |
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Like I posted in this thread... dear god, 5 years ago? My takeaway from my project is that you can't do it on a small scale. You have to have a very large system that can easily absorb PH hits and hold a lot of oxygenated water for pump breakdowns, otherwise you're just doing the spinning plate thing until they eventually all crash down and your fish die. People love upload videos to youtube of their pristine setups running perfectly, but nobody ever posts a video from a year later showing them running in the same state because eventually everything gets gross and breaks. Fish poop inexplicably sticks to PVC, as water evaporates the tiny particulates in your water get more concentrated, and I've yet to find a swirl filter design that was actually easy cleanable.
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# ? Jul 25, 2023 14:55 |
it would have to be set up like a for-real scientific experiment where you design a set of systems and then characterize them over some period of time. You could bore down thru the data to come up with a system that has the best size/stability ratio, instead of some random goon claiming no water changes or maint for 69 years. You'd have to actually rigorously figure out the goal tho. Is it just a saltwater tank that has the lowest conceivable maintenance? Is it a tank intended to rapidly process anything you throw in it? Somebody could map out the "regime space" and come up with real results. Because anything you put in you eventually have to take back out or internally sequester, chaining the system to a terrestrial phase could simplify things. I actually tried germinating coconuts I bought from the grocery store lol if you do this make sure they're in-husk live ones first. I was also at one point able to maintain an oyster reef, with oysters I bought from the seafood counter, which was insanely cool. Dividing a saltwater system into a landside and seaside might work, but i think it would work better if you have rapidly growing plants that easily reproduce themselves. If you tried to go with an actual coconut you're building the system around it, it becomes a bonsai tree. Same with mangrove. Using trees means you're going to very slowly end up with an extremely high nutrient demand. Something like glasswort would let you expand or contract demand more rapidly I bet. I'd maybe do a mix of the two. After a bunch of different setups get established then you can actually figure out if there really is a bare minimum size, if it's a hard cutoff, if it slopes, etc.
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# ? Jul 25, 2023 15:51 |
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I’ve beenplaying around with Kratky and DWC buckets for about a month, now. I’m finding hydroponics to be incredibly soothing, but it’s probably just the grow lights lessening my seasonal depression disorder. Any way, 4 bean plants in a 5 gallon tidy cat bucket, with a live bamboo shaft to act as a bean pole. Marsupial Ape fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Dec 27, 2023 |
# ? Dec 27, 2023 06:23 |