Aquaponics - Float Valve Mod

I installed a float valve on my aquaponics system because I grow a huge sphere of slime in there as free food for my Golden Comets.

I'm currently making a half hearted attempt at breeding them.

My Float valve looks exactly like this pictured to the left.



I bought it on eBay for two dollars I think.

It works pretty well but it doesn't put out a lot of water. I'm guessing it was designed to keep a dog bowl full or something, and for this it would be perfect. But I need a little extra flow.

Here it is in it's full "on" position.




And here in it's "off" position.

It does "off" pretty well, although I'm not overly fussed about it's "off" state. I dont really care if it leaks a little.

As you can see from the black pipe leading into it, there are some holes to make a spray to add a little aeration, but also to make sure there is never a situation where there is zero flow.



I only have a dozen or so adult goldfish in my system, and it is capable of holding a lot more.

 It could cope without any flow for a day or two, but the fish seem to enjoy their water moving around a bit.

The problem is that the slimeball I'm cultivating in the tank can sometimes find it's way into the outlet. The result is an overflow, and the sump tank running dry. The pump hates it when that happens, and I was lucky enough to catch it just before it ran dry a couple of days ago.

The point of the float valve was to slow the amount of water entering the fishtank if the water level gets too high. But because the flow through the device isn't very high, it isnt quite doing the task I assigned it.

I decided to make it flow a little faster.

To this end, I taped out the pin that holds it all together with a chopstick.

As expected, everything fell apart nicely, and I found that the thing worked by the float levering a small slide with a silicone stopper on the end. This blocked the water outlet when the float was
... floating

The bottom bit has the float on the end and fits into the box section on the next bit up. The lowest bit of green slimy plastic is the silicone stopper that presses against the next higher up bit of green slimy plastic.


I should write operating manuals.

The inlet hole did indeed turn out to be pretty small. Perhaps this is so the silicone stopper has a nice large surface area to stop leaks.

But I dont care about leaks because even when the slime blocks my system, it always lets some water through.

It never blocks it perfectly.

So I drilled it out to a size that should let more water through, but still allow the float to shut down the flow.

I had to do it by hand because the chuck on my drill has decided that it likes having the 13mm drill in it and refuses to surrender it no matter how I try to persuade the thing otherwise.

Thats what you get for running water all over the chuck when drilling stainless hinges and trying not to overheat the drill bit.

Somewhat surprisingly, the thing all fell back together as easily as it fell apart.

A few taps of the pin and it was all good.









So now the flow looks like this when it's in the "off" position.

Not a bad result.

Most of that flow is because I didnt bother to clean up the hole I drilled.

"Drilled" is probably a bit of a fantasy really.

Lets just say I made a hole with a drill bit.

In the "on" position I get a lot more flow now.

All in all I think this can be called a complete success.

And perhaps more importantly, it  shows that maybe I can still do stuff.

It's been a while.




If I care enough, I'll clean up the hole and make it so the flow actually stops when the float is floating.

Trying to drill by hand is fine until you actually make it through the thing your drilling. Then it becomes very difficult to make a clean hole because the drill bit just tries to screw itself into the item.

This is the "before" shot.






And this is the "after" shot.

The result is you get three quarters of a hole as you brake through the plastic.

I'll file it back to something like round if it turns out to matter.





So...

I did something.


120ThingsIn20Years Some of the photos were even in focus!

Sous vide - Rice cooker on keep

I just Sous vide(d) a steak to perfection in three hours in a thirty year old rice cooker on "keep".


There's a factory somewhere in Japan that's still turning out "old school" rice cookers. Or at least I figure there must be. It's either a factory that's still running, or a really, really big warehouse that's still full. You can still buy the exact same model as mine thirty years later. Perhaps they just left the factory running and forgot about it.







My impression of the situation is that there was an order placed thirty five years ago, and someone rocks up in a truck every few hours at the loading bay, and collects the latest batch for drop shipping around the world.

Anyway...

The rice cooker I'm talking about is the one I still use all the time, and looks like this.

Actually it looks a little less like this.

It looks like this, but without the meat thermometer I put under the lid.

Interestingly it keeps an interesting temperature.

Which is interesting.




If you happened to start by putting a quarter of a cup of water into it and set it to "keep" and "cook" so that it first cooks, then keeps, you will find that after the cook cycle has finished and it switches to "keep", you can fill it with hot water, and it will sit at around 57c.

Now it turns out 57c is a very interesting temperature.

You even get a bit of control.

You can control the temperature by putting a thermometer under the lid and thus creating a gap. (see observer effect as pertaining to cooking meat in a rice cooker/something about photons and so forth)

If you have a shallow depth of water you will get a slightly higher temperature, and if you fill it to the rim, you will get a slightly lower temperature.

I'm guessing that this is because it vents more heat the fuller it is. Something about the exposed hot surface area or something. (Search "something something law of thermodynamics or something".(Interestingly, a search for exactly that gets you everything you ever need to know about such stuff.))

Anyway...

Get a rice cooker and make it be on keep and fill it with hot water.

Then get a zip-lock sandwich bag, and drop a steak into it.

Just make the steak stay dry.

Then do one of the following to rid it of air pockets and expose all of it to even heat...

1. Submerge the steak in a bag in the water until the pressure forms a nice tight compression around the steak(s) then seal up the bag.

2. Seal up the bag but leave a tiny gap and suck the air out. (I used a straw)

3. Just leave the bag open, peg it to the side, and let the hot water in your rice cooker do it's thing with it's own pressure.

They all work.

So now... and this is the exciting bit...

Put the bag of steak into the hot water.

Leave it there until you get bored.


If you get bored in less than an hour and a half, leave it there until someone else gets bored.

I didn't get bored until around three hours the first time.

Read that last line again.

This is a steak cooked for three hours in a rice cooker on "keep" setting in a vat of water! (then very quickly fried)

It looked like this when I fried it for twenty seconds on each side and cut into it.

Yeah that's the same photo as above but I thought it was worth another look.


Bam!


I count this as a total success,


120 Things in 20 years doesn't cook steak the regular way any more, but still makes rice the regular way.

Aquaponics - Direct composter success

I just got back from my trip to the East coast of Australia, and was happy to find the system ticking along nicely.

Some of the dried duckweed in my direct composter looks like it might be trying to live again, but I cant tell if it's greening due to life or mould.

There must have been some heavy rain while I was away, as it was soaked through.

I think I'd better put a lid on it.

When I lifted it up I saw a stack of worms going to ground into the growbed, and some more hanging from the little composter.

The worms seem to like it.

It was also very easy to grab a handful of worms for the fish, so the fish seems to like it as well.

It should also be adding some nutrient back into the system, and also saving some because of the duckweed I removed, so the plant will like it as well.


All in all, I count this a complete success, and it seems like quite a good solution to my problem of only having one fish.



120 Things in 20 years thinks flying around in helicopters is a pretty good way to spend some time.

Aquaponics - Silver perch feast

I cant remember if I even mentioned this because I was probably in some kind of deranged pain killer broken rib induced state when it happened, but I may have forgotten to mention I ate one of my big silver perch.

It looked like this.

The South Australian Fisheries people suggest the most humane way (and best way to protect it's eating qualities) to dispatch a fish is to plunge it into an ice water slurry, and leave it there.

A few hours later I scaled and cleaned it, and lightly salted it inside and out.




I wrapped it in whatever you call thin plastic kitchen wrap where you live, and left it in the fridge for twelve hours, then cooked it whole.

It was one of the nicest fish I have ever eaten.

Crazy fat.

You cant really tell from this angle, but it was in very fat condition. Looking down from the top, it had that thick section just before it's tail like a dolphin.

Most wild caught fish don't seem to have that.

I'm guessing it's because life is a little tougher in the wild when you don't have an unlimited amount of feed available.

Anyway...

This fish was in very good condition and had excellent fat content.

Apparently silver perch fat is high in Omega 3, but it was mostly delicious.

It weighed 1.08kg gutted and scaled and was 33 cm long.

I wish I had built a much bigger system ages ago so I could have a lot more.

Successfully farming your own protein in only a couple of cubic meters or space is an amazing thing to be able to do in suburbia.

I totally recommend it.



120 Things in 20 years totally recommends it.

The shell grit seed raising seems to have worked.

There was some slight discolouration on some leaves that I think might be due to nutrient lockout because the pH is probably off the chart in that local area, but generally speaking, I think it works. The discolouration is not shown well on this pic. The true colour is closer to the lettuce leaf on the left.



When pH is at certain levels, various elements become less available. If your system sits at about pH 7.0 then everything is available.

I just lifted my first seedling out of the shell grit, and it had a 24cm root that came out in tact. I made no attempt to be gentle and just lifted it out. I tried another one and achieved the same result.

Anyway, no washing - not even a rinse, and three tiny bits of shell grit was all there was stuck to the roots.

I think I should have left it a little longer because there were hardly any side roots developed, but I planted it next to some existing established kale, so I'll have something to compare it with. The existing kale was planted around ten days earlier.

I add some seasol® from time to time, so I might add it directly into the shell grit once I see sprouts to make sure there are extra trace elements available next time. The slight discolouration might also be due to lower oxygen levels as the water probably moves quite slowly through the fine particles. I might sive the shell grit so I can get a slightly bigger particle size. I plan on reusing it for ever, so it's no big deal to sieve it.



120 Things in 20 years thinks raising seedlings in shell grit feels like a success

Projectiles - Dart cannon

I thought I'd make a cannon, and use the little dart I made when I built my blow dart gun with a laser sight as the projectile.

Making projectile launching things that shoot projectiles can be fun.

And stupid.

This project was both.

I started with a jumbo bag of party poppers.

They might be called something different where you live, but they are a little explosive device designed to deliver a quantity of litter into the environment.

They do it surprisingly effectively.

I pulled all the streamers and other junk out to reveal the small firework.

Then it was a simple matter of finding a tube that would fit over the bit that goes bang.

I found a bic pen worked a treat, and the tapered end meant it was easy to create the required seal by just forcing it into the handle of the popper, to surround the firework.

Like this.












Before jamming the pen into place I put the dart in at the firework end.

And this is where the stupid bit comes to the fore...

Then I pulled the string.

Luckily I had taken the precaution of wearing a scratched pair of sunglasses, and aiming in the general direction of the back wall of my shed (garage/iron clad building full of junk in my backyard).

The result was that I no longer own my little hand made blow gun dart.

It's gone now.

It's definitely still in the shed, but it really could be anywhere.

It went away really, really fast, and obviously didn't want to be found.

I think it must hate me.

The pen/cannon has a new fracture as well. You can see it in the milky burnt picture in the pic before last.

I put the inky bit of the pen loosely into the little cannon and re-loaded it to see how much power it had, and was a little surprised to see it actually shift it ... perhaps....6 feet.

That could come in handy if you ever needed to project a full stop to the far wall of whatever room you were in.

Very handy.



According to my calculations, all this means I could shoot a 44 magnum slug nearly a thousandth of an inch.

Which is nice.

Generally I prefer to blog about things that are kid friendly, but this time I guess I have to say...

Don't try this at home...

Unless you really, really want to.

But please, please, put on an old pair of sunglasses or some safety goggles, or wrap your kids in a mattress or something. And maybe just launch a polystyrene ball from a bean bag or a pug of potato or something. It's always embarrassing to rock up to emergency with a little dart poking into your kid's brain through one of the soft, squidgy, eye portals that the gods built into heads as a sick party joke to make you look silly when you rock up to emergency with a little dart poking into your brain.

Don't encourage them.

Besides, wearing safety goggles shows you and your kids that you at least have a certain confidence in your ability to create mayhem.

I count the cannonic loss of my little home made blow gun dart a total success.


120 Things in 20 years thinks it might be a good time to quit while I'm ahead. I can see making cannons is a thing I could rapidly get addicted to. Like crack and cross-stitch, some things are (apparently) too addictive to mess with.

Just say no.


 

Projectiles - Building a blow gun with laser sight

I thought I'd build a blow dart gun with a laser sight.

It turned out to be a total success.

It works well, and is much more fun than regular darts of the non-blown variety.

I started with a couple of pins, some string, some cotton, and a thin pipe. A broken car aerial works well, so does a pen casing. Even a drinking straw works at a pinch. The longer the better, and it's best to avoid flexible things as your pipe. Drinking straws tend to be a little less accurate.

I started by piercing the string so I had four strings stuck to my pin.

 I taped up the strings so they wouldn't move when I started to wrap them.

This next bit is really important.

Add a loop of cotton running the length of the pin.

Take some cotton and wrap it tightly to make a binding along about a third of the length of the pin.

I also made one where I used electrical heat shrink instead of cotton binding. It worked well, and was much faster to make, but didn't look as nice as one with binding.

Trying to tie off  the end of a binding is difficult unless you have that loop we added.

To finish your binding, pass the loose end through the loop.

Then pull the back of the loop all the way back. This will draw in the lose end, and secure it by tucking it under itself... under the binding.

That's really important string tech. As long as you plan it beforehand and add that loop it's easy, but without the loop, it's next to impossible.

 The end result looks something like this.

Next I took another pin and frayed the string.

Wool would work better, but I didn't have any.

When it's fully frayed, it looks like this.

You can us it like this, but it was a little slow, and not very accurate.










I trimmed mine down a bit.











The point of the tail is to create drag so it flies straight, and with the sharp end up the front where it belongs.

If you have even one thin strand longer than the others it can cause trouble.

A long strand will make your dart turn off course a bit, and can also get stuck between your lip and the tube, resulting in a blowing noise but no shooting.

An easy way to trim it is to put it into the blow pipe and cut any excess with scissors.

Next, I found my container full of prototyping plastic. I explain it in this post about it's possible use in making hand made fishing lures, but basically it's stuff that gets soft at 65 degrees centigrade or so, and sets hard once it cools.

Next, I got hold of a laser pointer ($15 or so), then it was a simple matter of heating up some prototyping plastic, and wrapping it around both the tube, and my laser pointer.

I added three screws that sit through the plastic so I can tighten them against the laser to adjust where it points in relation to the tube. That way, it's easy to adjust and make certain everything lines up properly.



I shot some video while I was sighting it. I placed the laser sighted blow dart gun in a clamp, and repeatedly shot it, and adjusted the screws to get it more accurate. A simple matter of firing, then moving the dot to the same spot as the dart hit.

PVC - PVC as a thermoplastic

It turns out, PVC isn't just my favourite product to work with, it's also a thermoplastic.

Who knew?

I should have remembered the thing I read back when I was making aquaponics grow tubes, but you don't know what I'm talking about, so there's probably no point in referencing it.

But on the up side, there is a point to this post.

And that's that PVC is even more excellent than I first thought.

It turns out (not my idea) that PVC can be heated, formed into a new shape, then cooled so it sets and stays with it's new shape.

You've gotta be happy with that.

PVC, but whatever shape you want!

I started by holding part of the delivery system from my demand fish feeder under a candle until it got a bit hot.

I'm always torn between the desire to keep a museum of the things I build as part of doing this "120 things in 20 years" caper, and grabbing a lump of kit from a previous project and reusing it at the expense of said project.

Oh well, I guess if it's worth building, it's worth building again.

The next step was to squish it a bit.

The steps after this include trying to make it fit the fillet knife I keep ominously lurking in my little tackle box.

That'sit there in blue.






I say ominously because when I'm fishing, it tends to be used to hack at somewhat suspect portions of slightly off bait sitting in the sun, then when I get home, I expect it to shed it's immuno-challenging persona with a quick wash n a soapy sink, and stop threatening to cut me and give me some hideous infection.

I also expect it to get suddenly sharp enough to fillet fish.

Sometimes I expect too much.

But this time it turns out I oddly expect around about what's reasonable to expect.

This is mainly due to my sudden understanding of how to make stuff sharp. I've been using a honing steel for the last 20 years to keep my kitchen knives useful, but for some reason, suddenly I now seem to be able to make them half again as sharp. (((see chunking) actually see the top of the chunking article because that makes more sense) or this if you want to skip the links...

If you learn Morse code, you learn it gradually for a bit, then suddenly instead of thinking of the word "and" as...

dot dash blah blah
blah blah blah
blah dash etc

you start to know it as a single entity in much the same way as you originally knew the individual letters. ie the group "and" becomes the 27th letter of the alphabet. The result is that the learning process is non-linear, and you tend to gain new ability in "chunks" rather than gradually.)

Why am I distractedly talking about chunking motor tasks?...

So...

Sharp is much better.

And oddly safer.

Anyway, the result is that now, more than ever, I need a sheath for the razor blade that rattles around in my tackle box and kitchen.

The knife in question is only an inexpensive thing, and it doesn't hold an edge for long, but it does readily allow itself to take on a scary sharpness. I guess there's a compromise between gaining an edge, and keeping an edge, and this inexpensive fillet knife has chosen as it's lot in life, to be way sharp. At least for a bit.

Quite useful for fish filleting really.

PVC is a thermoplastic!...

The "holding it over a flame" thing works a bit, but it's a little tricky softening the entire thing so you can bend the entire thing all at once.

But boiling water made that a whole heap easier.

If you don't have an enormous pot of boiling water, I recommend you send any kids safely away for the afternoon, and just dump boiling water all over the place in order to heat up your PVC.





It actually doesn't take that much.

I'm guessing a hair dryer would do it.

I used half a cutting board, and a sizzling steak hotplate holder to squish it flat after I heated it to bendy point.

You could also just step on it.

It's quite soft, and cures to it's new shape in only a few seconds.

The result was something that looked a lot like a folded flat length of PVC pipe.

Actually this is (obviously) the result of a different method, but both ended with a folded length of PVC tubing.

This one was done with the aid of two clamps, and pouring boiling water all over the house.




There are probably a dozen more ways to do it.

Heat it, then squish it flat.

This post has derailed a bit, so to re-cap, I'm making a knife sheath from PVC pipe by heating it and reforming it to shape.

Place your knife over the top of the flattened PVC envelope, and loosely trace around it with some kind of marking device leaving around a centimetre of excess white space around the blade.

I used a pen, but you could also use whatever marking method your culture enjoys.

Next I cut out the shape with tin snips, scissors, and a hacksaw to test as many methods I could find at hand. That's why this photo actually came before the last.

Yeah...

time can do that.

The result was the start of a pretty convincing knife sheath.

I drilled a few holes.

I added a loop rubber band made from a slice of bicycle tyre inner tube (bicycle tyre inner tube rubber bands last around 25,000 years longer than normal rubber bands)

The loop will hook over the handle and act as the fail safe, and might allow me to wear it in a way that might be a little more practical than hanging it on a belt.

And a few more holes to snug it all up tight to the blade with some multi-strand artificial fibre twine and we are done.

I count this as a total success.

Much less dangerous.

And now probably safe enough to take on an epic adventure.



It will still need to be washed after using it to handle bait, but at the moment I cant see a way past that as a compromise.

If you try it yourself, make sure there is a bit of space between the PVC folds at the sharp end to allow water to pass through when you wash it, and also make sure the bindings pull the PVC together tight enough that the blade can never touch the binding twine. The easiest way to achieve this is to not take the bindings all the way to the tip of the sharp end. And to stick something in the end when you are heat-forming the sheath. However you do it, try to make sure you can see through the sheath when it's empty, to allow rinsing the sheath.

I found that after it was finished, heating the entire thing while the blade was removed, and bending it slightly from end to end, made the blade sit a bit tighter. Enough so that you could could hold the sheathed knife upside down and shake it, (without the safety rubber band) and the knife would not fall out of the sheath.

A total success, and definitely some tech that I will add to the ever growing grab bag of tricks that I might employ to solve something, somewhere, one day.




120 Things in 20 years just came back from a quick trip into the future, and found it's all made of PVC...

and there's some 3D printed concrete housing.

but the future's definitely made mostly of PVC.