Well, hydroponics is plants in water instead of soil medium. Aquaculture is usually the cultivation of aquatic creatures for food (i.e. fish, prawns, etc). Aquaponics is both together. I think wikipedia has a better description than what I can write (see Wiki entry).

In a nutshell, it’s combining the aquaculture (in my case, Fish) with the hydroponics part. If you’ve kept any fish before, you’d definitely realize that they do produce a fair bit of waste. Otherwise, pet shops won’t be trying to sell you that fancy filter and pump kit plus no matter what, you’d still end up cleaning and changing the water eventually.

Well, let nature do it for you is the name of the aquaculture game. The waste the fishes produce is actually pretty good for plants. So hence my project.

I’ve an outdoor man-made pond with about forty odd Tilapia fishes. They eat and shit a lot. That’s because most of them are edible size by now. Just so you know, these are the 4th generation in my pond (yes, life finds a way to breed) and edible size means over 1.1kg (approx 4.5 lbs). I put a pump in to push the water out into a poly tank what holds hydrokorrels – I can’t find the brand or type I use but this link is pretty close.

The water fills up and gets flushed down and back to the pond. The challenge was that most plants don’t like their roots drowned under water. The roots tend to rot quickly. The solution was inspired by the toilet bowl. Taking some physics lessons, a simple siphon can be created with off-the-shelf PVC pipe parts. This siphon works when the water reaches a certain level. Once the water reaches the right level, it will immediately begin the flush phase where it actually dumps all the water rapidly.

The challenge is to find a fill rate fast enough to trigger the siphon effect but yet slow enough to allow time for the roots to breathe between fill cycles. After some careful tuning, my Laguna 8,000l/hour pump fills my growbed tank in about 10 minutes but dumps the water in 70 seconds.

The diagram is below. Basically the outer 84mm cap is to prevent dirt, leaves and other stuff from clogging the siphon. It does also help you to adjust/tune the water level by creating a barrier to hold the grow bed medium (those hydrokorrels) away from the siphon proper. You won’t need to remove everything just to make adjustments. For the return pipe, the siphon effect is stronger with at least one bend (elbow joint) plus a pipe length of at least half a meter or twenty-odd inches.

Here are my growbed and pond photos.

Adjustment valves to tune the water going into my other filters/hydroponics troughs and the growbed. My 8000L/hr pump is too powerful for a single growbed at the moment.

The return valves/pipes into my pond.

Sweet basil, Thai basil, Mint, rosemary and spinach growing nicely.

The siphon assembly.

My basil and 3 day-old spinach plants. Spinach grows pretty well and fast. I get to harvest them every ten days.

My Tilapia fish. Hardy and dirty. Just what’s needed for the plants. They’re edible too and fast growing.

One thing for sure is that it’s always with me so it’s always the best camera — even when I’m lugging a truck-load of photo equipment, it still allows me to document, capture and basically, photo-log my activities.

More importantly, it lets me capture events and people important to me. I’ve every photo taken since my iPhone 2G days and the count is in the five digits. Browsing through the photos is like stepping back in time.

Websites and email aside as those are to be expected of any entity or organization today. I think it’s time they embrace more tools to enable better and greater reach.

Recently, our cell group scheduled a session with the esteemed Reverend Lim Kar Yong of STM to teach us on a series of Parables. Well, we decided to enlarge his audience by combining with Kinrara cell group via web-cast. Of course other members who could not make it could also attend the webcast session. Slides, audio and video were broadcast at standard definition. It was evident however that our regular Malaysian home ADSL service (Streamyx) would not cut it even though the webcast only required a downlink of about 350kbps. On a 1mbps line, the video would be choppy and occasionally drop out.

It was an interesting experiment though and one we would continue for the next three weeks. For those who couldn’t attend the webcast, we have audio recordings and if you want to watch, we have a HD video recording of the session as well!

I’ll blog about the tools we used in a separate post later this week.

Anyways, along with Chinese New Year, it was also my father-in-law’s birthday. It’s kinda cool to have your birthday around Chinese New Year because everyone will know about it and you will get more presents! Anyways, I digress but we got him a fancy iPad2 which I setup to keep him busy with lots of e-mags, news portals, flip board and more.

For lunch, we went to this restaurant in Sri Kembangan that is famous for it’s Poon Choi. Read the wikipedia link if you want to find out more but it is translated wrong in my opinion. It should read “basin dish”. Inside this boiling pot, we had chicken, oyster, vegetables, pork, prawns, bean curd, fish maw, bean curd skin, abalone, eel, fish balls and more…

Anyways, the food is pretty decent fare but the highlight of course was the Poon Choi which was full of stuff to eat. There were other dishes of course such as fish-wrapped oyster with sea weed balls, suckling pig and stewed goose feet with sea cucumber. I ate everything except the feet — I don’t eat legs… chicken legs, pig legs, cow legs, fish legs, human legs… whatever.

The food is pretty good and it’s a pretty packed on the Saturday we went. I don’t know if the other dishes are worth going for though. They’re famous for their Poon Choi so if you are longing for that dish, the one they serve up is pretty good.

Hee Lai Ton
12, Jalan Muhibah 3,
Taman Muhibah,
Seri Kembangan,
43300 Selangor D.E.
03 8992 5561

2011 is the year everything changed.

The year, I will never ever be the same again.

The year I received the biggest gift and the biggest responsibility from our God, ever.

The year dreams were born.

The year the long difficult journey on the long winding road begins.

2012 is all about passion and dreams.

All in all, what we do in life, is far greater than all the wealth, power and prestige combined. At funerals, no one talks about the wealth and power you have amassed. It’s the legacy and impact you’ve had on people’s lives. Onward to 2012!

I just love this post on downward mobility by Alvin Ung.

Here’s looking back the 12 months in photos from blog entries excerpted over the year.

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

Surprisingly no photos and no entries in April.

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Gingerbread house Timelapse from Eugene Khoo on Vimeo.

Anyways, sans maid, what to do when you’ve an infant around the house who is starting to crawl about? I’ve also a bustling studio in the living room area at times and cleaning up is always a chore. From friends, relatives and my own parents, I’ve got good reviews of the iRobot Roomba 581. In fact, an aunt of mine has a veritable army of iRobot Roombas and Scoobas cleaning her house.

As Malaysia never gets the latest stuff, I noticed the 7-series robots being sold on Amazon. While waiting for my 581 to be delivered, Aetis, the Malaysia distributor and reseller had the 780 in stock! So I switched and got the 780 instead. Am I glad indeed!

Biggest difference I noticed between the 780 and the 581 is battery life. My parents had their little 581 for 2.5 years now and the poor guy would only be able to clean about 2.2 hours before “Please charge roomba” would be announced (This only happens when it can’t find the docking station). My 780 in casual tests has gone for about 4+ hours before needing a recharge. This meant that I could clean over 1,500 square feet without a recharge. Your mileage will vary of course. Run-time will depend on the amount of carpeting, obstacles, furniture and of course, dirt! The HEPA filters also are a big improvement and the new AeroVac series 2 bins are easier to clean and seem to hold a ton of crap vacuumed off my floor!

Overall, another improvements on the 780 vs the 581 seems (no scientific test here) to be a slightly smarter in navigating the furniture and is slightly faster cleaning rooms for the 780. It’s specifications say the 780 is quieter but it’s still noisy and you might not want it to clean your house on schedule at 3am for example.

Results wise, I will say the the Roomba 780 out cleans the maid anytime. The floor is cleaner than even me sweeping and vacuuming. Of course it can’t clean certain corners and areas it can’t get to won’t be clean but it does perform as advertise – 98% clean! The low-profile robot also gets under most of my furniture, including Lorenzo sofas, Ikea Effektiv cabinets. See the photo below where it is cleaning my home-office. The big benefits to me is that after a studio shoot session, I can go download photos, take a shower while the little robot cleans up after me or that I can let it clean the rooms while I’m out for lunch.