#sandponics — Public Fediverse posts

An outdoor #aquaponics system with everbearing strawberries and #tilapia, using sand as growing media. This greatly reduces evaporation and seems to work well overall. It's also arguably more efficient, as the sand retains water for longer and it doesn't need to cycle as much.

The challenge we've had to overcome is that because it needs to cycle for only 2 minutes every 2 hours, a timer is needed.
Our electricity comes from a crappy modified sine inverter designed for a truck, and it tends to fry digital timers for whatever reason (analog timers work, but only in increments of 15 min), so I finally set up an #arduino microcontroller running off a phone charger as a timer and it finally works. Why doesn't that also get fried? No idea! But so far it's doing fine.

#sandponics
#hydroponics
#strawberries
#waterscarcity
#gardening