Vermicelli

[FishBubs]

Just another note regarding daphnia. I had a bunch living in chlorella water outside in a bucket. We have had freezing temperatures and i forgot to move it before freeze hit. Now this bucket is about 5 litres and 3/4 was solid ice leaving the bottom quarter in liquid state. However, daphnia were still going about their business at the bottom of the bucket amongst chlorella clumps after enduring -7 C. Hardy little fellas. Needless to say they are defrosting now in the shed with a fresh batch of green water.

[Vale!]

Great device, FB - well played! And you confirmed the fact that I've been way overdosing on the Fish Mix. I'll have to get back to the original article to see if/how I misinterpreted the info on there.

I've taken the plunge and have changed to F2 fertiliser. Old contents of carafe now in bottles and new carafe started with 2 litres of tap/Prime plus 10ml of bottle-bottom gunk. I'm keeping both lights on this time; and next time I'll use just the white LEDs, to see whether the red/blue one is really necessary. Incidentally : I found my algae-measuring device and so can say this new carafe started with a cell density of around 9 million per millilitre! Good grief! I had measured the 'old' carafe before bottling and it was c17.1 million/ml. That must mean it compacts incredibly when it piles up at the bottom of a bottle, like a neutron star! If my tame mathematician is reading this he may be able to estimate the amount of compaction - it's quite beyond me!

Give those Daphnia medals - and a chittering bite!

I'm looking forward to hearing how laptop cooler performs. That would increase productivity no end.

Bye the bye: 'M' just called. Wants you to tell 'Q' about all this. Moneypenny will make the arrangements.

[FishBubs]

Great device, FB - well played! And you confirmed the fact that I've been way overdosing on the Fish Mix. I'll have to get back to the original article to see if/how I misinterpreted the info on there.

I've taken the plunge and have changed to F2 fertiliser. Old contents of carafe now in bottles and new carafe started with 2 litres of tap/Prime plus 10ml of bottle-bottom gunk. I'm keeping both lights on this time; and next time I'll use just the white LEDs, to see whether the red/blue one is really necessary. Incidentally : I found my algae-measuring device and so can say this new carafe started with a cell density of around 9 million per millilitre! Good grief! I had measured the 'old' carafe before bottling and it was c17.1 million/ml. That must mean it compacts incredibly when it piles up at the bottom of a bottle, like a neutron star! If my tame mathematician is reading this he may be able to estimate the amount of compaction - it's quite beyond me!

Give those Daphnia medals - and a chittering bite!

I'm looking forward to hearing how laptop cooler performs. That would increase productivity no end.

The lights i am using at the moment are just white ones so will be good to compare notes.

Ooh you have another gadget - algae measuring device - that is getting googled. What will be interesting is the m/ml taken over several intervals. We would get a nice picture of the rate of clumping. Just out of curiosity, when the clumps are at the bottom at an advanced stage of culture, what is the reading of the lighter green liquid at the top most? I wonder if always separates at the same rate and reaches same level of clumps to ratio of what is left in top section?

[FishBubs]

On one of my next attempts, i am going to make up 3 bottles. But i wont use tap water/ prime this time. I am going to use water from my aquarium at the next water change. Nitrates at this water change are between 5ppm and 10ppm with TDS of 112.
TDS straight out of tap is on average 56. So the bottle compositions will be
- 1.5 L tank water, 1ml fish mix and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch)
- 1.5L tank water, 0.5 ml fish mix, and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch)
- 1.5L tank water, no fish mix and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch).

I am looking to see just how necessary fish mix is or how greedy chlorella is.

[Vale!]

Ooh you have another gadget

Yes ... and no! I've had it for some time but couldn't remember where I'd put it (it was actually in the most logical drawer, but deeply buried!). You've probably now caught up with what it is - just a measuring stick and a printed table! - but just in case you haven't :





Source was : https://www.zmsystems.co.uk/florida-aqu ... -622-p.asp

It should be reasonably simple to make one out of a white ruler, a permanent marker and superglue?


And I've (just now!) converted the table into a graph to make it easier for me to interpret fractions of a centimetre :



The graph (free!) software is at : https://www.padowan.dk/


I can't independently measure the density of the 'clumped' portion at the bottom of a bottle, but what I've done is measure at the top both before and after shaking. If not you, then maybe another numerical wizard (appealing to my tamed mathematician @Gingerlove05!) will be able to come up with some sort of formula which we can use to estimate the original 'compaction ratio'?

As an example from this morning (I didn't have the graph at that point) :

Bottle started 17/11/24. Unshaken = 7.5cm = 5.7 m/ml. Shaken = 3.5cm = 20.35m/ml.

Is that the sort of approach that you had in mind?

[Vale!]

I am going to use water from my aquarium at the next water change. Nitrates at this water change are between 5ppm and 10ppm with TDS of 112.
TDS straight out of tap is on average 56. So the bottle compositions will be
- 1.5 L tank water, 1ml fish mix and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch)
- 1.5L tank water, 0.5 ml fish mix, and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch)
- 1.5L tank water, no fish mix and chlorella (dregs of a previous batch).

I am looking to see just how necessary fish mix is or how greedy chlorella is.

That's going to be interesting!

The recipe for F2 fertiliser is available online. From memory it contains: nitrate ; phosphate ; trace elements ; and vitamins. I guess Fish Mix might have all of these (unless it was subjected to heat treatment during manufacture, in which case the 'vitamin' bit may have been clobbered?).

[Gingerlove05]

I caught my name and something to do with calculating
What are we looking for on the result end?
From what i can see we have 7.5cm depth where the stick disappears saying there’s 5.7 million cells per ml,
once shaken the stick disappears at 3.5cm saying there’s 20.35 million cells per ml. How many ml of waster is the bottle roughly? (From the picture i’m going to approximate around 400ml)
Stick disappears (7.5/3.5) 2.14x depth before shaking and (20.35/5.7) 3.57x no of cells increase after shaking.
400ml x no of cells = total in entire body of water
So 400ml x 5.7 = 2280 m cells total
And 400ml x 20.35 = 8140
8140/2280 =3.57
So the increase ratio would be multiply your first reading by 3.57, meaning the chlorella are initially “compacted” about 3.57x their total numbers. Hope that makes sense, I’ve tried to show any working out so you can see where my brain is going (thats dangerous btw )

[FishBubs]

Yup that makes perfect sense @Gingerlove05 . Once i make a freshwater secchio disk, i will also measure because i am curios to know if my samples will show anything close to that level of compactness. If there is any form of relationship (which will be useful info to no-one bar me and possibly @Vale! . i will keep to the same bottle size but the only other variants will be the ferts, light etc. But will see