Aquaponic install - First attempt

I have been gardening for a couple years now, mostly container gardening, where you build containers, add soil and plant something every square foot. I usually built the framework of a box and sat it on the ground. I would put down some weed guard underneath before I added the dirt to keep weeds out. It works pretty well, but because I built them on the ground, you still had to bend over to work on them, not a big deal but still not optimal for a lazy person such as myself. In any event, in my reading of gardening ideas, I came across the idea of aquaponics. Basically it works out like this. You have a large fish tank, the fish excrete waste and ammonia into the water. Now if left alone this water will eventually become toxic to the fish, the waste would kill them, so we have to have some way to clean the water, in comes the plants. See, when you set up a plant bed in aquaponics you use growing media, not dirt. You can use pea gravel or lava rocks or any of a number of media. In any event these beds will develop bacteria, this is good for a couple of reasons, the bacteria will work on the fish waste and turn it into fertilizer for the plants to use as food and by removing the toxic fish waste, it purifies the water so it can go back into the fish tank. 


That's the basic concept, in reality it mimics an ecosystem, all things in  balance, just like nature. It's interesting to me that as we become more advanced we find ourselves looking more and more towards to nature for a template of how to do things. The fish waste acts as fertilizer for the plants and the plants in turn purify the water, via the bacteria that transfers the waste into nitrates. This system uses 1/10th the amount of water of standard gardening as all of the water is kept in a closed loop for the most part. You will have some lost to evaporation but on the whole it is far superior in terms of water usage as compared to standard farming. As a side note, the latest revolution in solar energy actually mimics the actions of leaves on a tree. One day we'll be able to cover windows and glass doors with a translucent photoelectrochemical film and generate electricity as well as still see through the film.


So back to aquaponics, I am going to try to document my successes (failures as I see fit, haha) so you can see how easy it is.... or how much fun it is to laugh at someone who has no clue what they're doing. I'm still in the design phases but here's what I got so far:


Fish tank- Found one of those 330 gallon totes on craigslist for $75.00. Here's a pic of what they look like.

I am going to cut the very top off and I should have about 300 gallons of water space. I had planned on trying a smaller tank at first but someone off an aquaponics forum advised making the fish tank as big as possible because a bigger tank makes the system more tolerant of mistakes. Apparently the smaller the system the more a small mistake can have catastrophic results. On a side note here, it is important you know what was IN these totes. You want to make sure it was something safe

Grow Beds- I found a guy down the road who has food grade plastic barrels for $12 each, that's a really good deal as most of the other places I found them were a) out of town and b) $20. Plus the guy has hundreds more. I will be cutting these in half and filling them with pea gravel as my grow media.

I may cut them in half horizontally, I have been told that works better if I use the type of drainage method I want to use.

Fish choice- I think I'm going to go with catfish. Tilapia are the standard choice since they are very tolerant supposedly of mistakes in water quality. But I know I like to eat catfish and I always like to be a little different anyway. Heck, I might even through in a few freshwater shrimp if I can find some the catfish don't eat.

My 1968 Lee-Liner restoration PT 2 or How I lost my last sliver of Sanity

Ok so we left off with me getting some of the siding off of the old girl and seeing that I was dealing with a Flintstone trailer, feet through the floorboard and all, and almost as old.

Well, I have now removed all the tin on the drivers side and it has been inspirational. Inspirational in the sense that it has inspired me to not ever do this again. NO , really it has inspired me comically as well. Let me share some jokes I have come up with so far

What's the first thing I do after working on my camper? 
Repent!

Knock, Knock.

Who's there?

A guy with a trailer for sale.

Hold on while I get my shotgun and rock salt.

How many Mitch's does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

WHAT THE CRAP KINDA LIGHT BULB IS THIS??? DO THEY EVEN MAKE THESE ANYMORE?? AND THE WOOD HOLDING IT UP HAS ROTTED?!?!? SOMEONE SUPER-GLUED AND DUCT TAPED IT UP?!?!

A man, who is, by the way, restoring a camper, walks into a bar. and cries big sad man tears.

Some good stuff huh? yeah I think so too.

So kids let's look at what my knuckle-busting day revealed. Oh by the way I had a rhetorical question for everyone. What hurts worse? Hitting your knuckle with a hammer? Or somehow managing to find that exact same spot not 2 but 3 times? Ask me later for the answer.

The mosquitoes around here are pretty annoying, probably because we're close to the woods and all, or maybe I put off a scent that says "my blood tastes like mosquito ice cream." Any way, I have to wear a mosquito repellant when I'm out there. I also have to use a rust cutting lubricant to loosen some of the bolts. So imagine this mixture- Sweat, Deep woods off and WD-40, mmmmm. Just sticky enough for the small chunks of sawdust and cobwebs to stick too. Someone remind me again why I'm doing this? Oh yeah, I'm an idiot.

OK so before I took the tin off the wheel section, here's what she looked like.

Not bad, huh? looks like good, sound construction.

DOH!

Upon looking at the space over and behind the wheel well I had an odd thought. "Seems like there out to be some wood there", thinks I, "Strange to see staple and nails just sorta hanging there all dangly-like." Yep in place of wood there seemed to be something that might just be ancient termite poop. I can only hope that the leaking walls dropped enough water on the termites to drown a few of them. Petty, yeah I know, but I was mad, sorry.

Think when I replace the wood I'll use treated wood, treated with termite poison! Camping will be fun, camping will be fun , camping will be fun.

Gonna need a total rebuild of this entire section and the floor underneath. Matter of fact the whole floor around the edges will need to be rebuilt unless I want to spend every minute in the camper walking like that guy off KUNG FU trying not to leave a mark on the rice paper.

Yeah i know I'm putting videos in my blog now, well I just learnt how to do it so I'm showing off, helps me to know I can still do something right in some field.

Yet another shot of rotten wood, isn't this fun AND informative?

If you look really hard you can see the remnants of the little termite town that was here, complete with the note that say "Nothing left to eat here so we left, thanks!"

That was polite of them.

Check this window out, it decided to mess with me and be tough, heh heh. I taught it a lesson.

Yeah!!! Who's the tough guy now? Now maybe you'll think about it while you're decomposing on a junk heap and I'm out spending my money on a new window that will probably cost more than.....DANG! why does everything that ticks me off have to be an inanimate object?

So here is the whole side with the tin off, after many hours with rusty weird-headed screws, much WD-40 and a few tantrums.

I may get motivated later and go out and work on it, or I may just stay inside spray myself with WD-40 and smack my knuckles with a hammer, at least that way I can stay cool.

Camper Restoration

Most of you who know me know that I don't exactly seek out ways to exert myself. I would be perfectly happy if my sweat glands were only called upon to function in the presence of a jacuzzi or a sauna. So how exactly did I decide to take on a project such as restoration of a camper as old as I am? Well, let's see. I guess I am prone to the occasional flight of fancy with little thought of following through. While having dinner at my cousins' house Dale (cousin) showed me his project. It was a tow behind pop-up trailer that had been wrecked which he had restored. 'Wow", I thought, "what a great idea! Tomorrow morning I am going to start looking for a cool old trailer I can fix up and we can all go camping!" Apparently for me excitement causes memory loss because for a full day or two I forgot a couple of things:

1) I have no carpentry skills- All the males on my mother's side of the family (the side who had just restored a camper) have carpentry skills but that gene abandoned me. It must be recessive and my father's gene cancelled it out. The gene that I inherited makes hammers irresistibly drawn to my thumbs.

2) Attention span- I have none. The only way I will complete a project is if something is baring down on me like a time deadline or a monetary reward or a wife who demands I remove " that camper toilet" from the front yard.

But being that one of those three conditions did exist, I found myself more motivated than usual.
I sure do love my wife.

The camper in question was purchased less than 24 hours after dinner with the relatives. Dale had informed me that my uncle Leonard had also purchased a pop up and that they had a camping trip planned in a few weeks. I thought to my self "that would be fun, I should take the wife and kid!" Once again the excitement of the moment making me forget I generally dislike anything that causes me discomfort (see above-re:sweat) such as mosquitoes, substandard toilets, 1/2 thick foam rubber mattresses and missing Top Chef.

Now, given a few days to allow my excitement to wear off I made have made a different decision, maybe got something a little nicer or at least something a little more not-held-together-by-spider-webs-and-hope. But as price was an issue, I was fairly limited in my camping options to either a fixer upper or a walmart 2 man tent. But as fate would have it within my "excitement cooling off" period I found her.


As you can see, she looks pretty good from the outside. But when we look inside we can see that someone has taken the easy way out in the upkeep department.




Notice the 2X4's, don't they were original issue. The curtains on the bed would need to be washed before they were even clean enough to through away.



If you look at this picture you can see the warped first layer of the paneling. This was present pretty much anywhere there was any opening for moisture. I am forced to believe either the seals of the windows leak or the previous owners had some wicked water balloons battles on a regular basis.



Oooooooo! A GOLDSTAR appliance! Nothing says quality like a product that shares a name with medicated foot powder. Notice the rope that has been added to the counter for a "nautical" touch I imagine. It doesn't so much come across as "nautical" as it does "here's a convenient piece of rope for tying up hostages". There's no limit to what a redneck with a glue gun can accomplish. I'm just glad I didn't find a talking bass on a plaque duct taped to the wall. I did however find a can of baked beans in the cabinet, that could have explained some of the smell.

The man who was selling it claimed it had no leaks and I trust that as far as he knew he was telling the truth, I mean in my experience most people of impaired sight are fairly honest. Or maybe it leaked sometime before he had it, who knows? Although I didn't get the Manis carpentry gene, I did inherit the Manis frugality that prompts me to always want to get something less than what someone is asking for it. He wanted $500, I offered $450 and he jumped on immediately. I assumed the warning light going off in my head was because I thought I left the oven on at home. He delivered it for an extra $20 and it was a done deal. He left and I couldn't help think of the horror story where one man passes on a cursed item to another man and the poor sap even pays him to take it. Well, this poor sap is actually going to follow through this time. I really don't have a choice, the wife draws the line at broken camper toilets left sitting in the front yard.

On to stage one- Assessing the damage
Well, it ain't good. Rotted wood at the bottom corners of about 70% of the floor edges, rotting wood in the walls, about 20 % and sections of floor that were held up by the aluminum shell underneath. See below.


What you're looking at here is the roof vent, looks like its been taken off and reinstalled by someone who was not so much worried about aesthetics as he was showing people that he could still work fine while drunk. The screws on the vent lip there are anchored solidly into crumbling, rotted 40 year old paneling. Makes for a crappy water barrier but a top rate sieve.



This little construct was where some enterprising person decided to add an air conditioner to the camper. Not a completely bad job except for planning and execution. The air conditioner sat on a 2X4 crossbeam until the water from the AC unit dripped down the interior long enough to rot it away. I mean completely, what was left was like a piece of solid black mold.



So now it just sits in the frame that someone fashioned out of a piece of plywood. Needless to say removing it was the easiest part of this job so far.



See the bowed paneling? The crossbeam behind it was rotted to dust. I then began removing paneling on the ceiling and walls inside to get a look at what I had gotten myself into.



Yep that's what I'm talking about. It's rotted all the way through that corner so the flooring will have to be torn up to rebuild part of the floor joists. I'm not crying I had rotted wood in my eye, shut up.
After pulling off some outside aluminum siding here's what we got.



The wood here is underneath a window and is about 40% rotted, it will have to be replaced. But here's one of the ugliest sites yet. This is the section of paneling I have removed but look closer at the left corner.







That's rotted wood underneath the left (drivers side) front corner, literally just crumbling away, since those beams most likely go all the way across, the whole lower half of the front will most likely have to be rebuilt.

This is the floor underneath the refridgerator, rotted down to the joist. fun fun.



One more little curve that got thrown at me is the odd head on 99% of the screws in this thing, like nothing I have ever seen, I suspect they're not made anymore.



I plan on keeping a blog with lots of pictures but luckily no sounds of crashing thumbs and expletives. That way years from now you can all have a good laugh at the old man who still sits on his carport restoring a 75 year old camper he never plans to sleep in.