www.goanna.com

We are pleased to announce that we have just purchased an 11 acre farmlet in East Gippsland.  The property is a little ripper with two cottages located on the land along with a small garage and a half-decent machinery shed!  There is also a substantial orchard with about 35 trees & plants including Apple, Orange, Lemon, Lime, Mandarin, Cumquat, Loquat, Pear, Peach, Tangelo, Nectarine, Apricot, Feijoa, Nashi, Carob, Grapefruit, Olive, Grape, Blackberry, Avocado, Fig, Mulberry, Chestnut, Walnut, Hazelnut, Guava & Plum.  There are some basic cattle yards and a chook shed that needs a bit of a renovation.  The place has been let go a little so we will have a lot of work to do once we move in.  The fruit trees need a lot of attention and the dam is as dry as a cracker!  The fencing is in a fairly good state and there is enough feed to support a couple of head of cattle without requiring any extra feed in the short term.  We will also be adding a 6m by 12m shed with a 3m wide lean-to along its side.  The lean-to will be the home of our Aquaponics set up and I will add another tank to the shed to help maintain the Aquaponics.  Stay tuned for more as we move in soon & will be posting regular updates (-:

Well I'm excited.  We picked up our new (used) trailer this afternoon.  I was very fortunate to have a builder friend sell it to me for a very reasonable price.  We will be towing the trailer from Brisbane to Nicholson in the new year (a mere 1643 kilometers / 1020 miles).  It will be chock full of the pot plants we want to keep and I'll pop my aquaponics IBC in there too!  But wait ... there's more....my parents have given us a lovely Hereford cow to get us started.  No land yet but we already have a cow .. how good is that (-:  I officially ceased paid employment today so now it's time to concentrate on packing and maybe taking a couple of trips up to North Queensland while we have the chance.  Merry Christmas everyone.

Well tomorrow is my last day at Merlo Coffee here in Brisbane.  All I can say is that it has been a hoot.  A great bunch of people, passionate about their product and fun to work with.  I know this is the next step on our road to self-sufficiency but it's sad to leave all of mates at Merlo behind )-:  If you are after seriously good coffee visit www.merlo.com.au

Cheers,

Scott.

Well our house has sold and we are off in early January to Victoria!  Now all we need to do is pack, move & find a new place to live.  Once we have moved I will be blogging a lot more about our adventures (-:.

Well our new agent has taken over and we have an offer on the house!  It has been pretty stressful but the building inspection has been done.  It's handy getting the results as it turned up a couple of minor things that I had not noticed, but it's all good.  We now have a list of jobs to do to make the house perfect (-:.  Now I'm working on a budget for the move, if it all goes ahead we will have to get everyhting shifted by late January .. hmmm that will be fun to organise.

With the help of a couple of mates (thanks Anthony & Kim) I went to pick up my latest ebay acquisition, an 800 litre IBC container.  This puppy is going to be turned into our first fully fledged aquaponics system.  Not only that but it will come fully equipped with a wireless iobridge module that will allow me to monitor and control the entire system via the Internet.  Now I can keep an eye on the water temperature and pump status from anywhere in the world (-:

The IBC, cut and ready for installation of the
suppports and plumbing.

The iobridge module connected to a wireless
access point.  This will interface with the pumps
and provide water quality information.

Well, we have had the house on the market for several months now & have yet to get a firm offer.  A lot of people have looked through and most like it a lot.  Common feedback we get is that it's a shame that it only has 3 bedrooms.  So what to do?  Well why not add another bedroom (-:  We have had plans drawn up to split our rather large master bedroom into two to provide an extra bedroom.  The plans include an extra toilet downstairs as well to service the two other bedrooms down there without having any impact on access to the ensuite from the master bedroom!  So stay tuned as we start to crunch the numbers to see if this plan is a goer!

We were excited to happen across a great new Australian innovation,the biodegradable toothbrush. To quote their website: "The Environmental Toothbrush is a simple solution. Made from bamboo, a natural cellulose fibre, they are 100% biodegradable, environmentally sustainable, and do not pollute the environment. The amazing growth and self-renewing ability of bamboo means that deforestation is not necessary either. Even our packaging is bio-degradable." We received our first batch yesterday and they look pretty good.  Whilst they are made in China, and thus clock up some serious carbon miles, at least they are recycleable, non toxic and a great innovation! Now if only Dr. Nat can find a manufacturer here in Australia this would be the perfect product. Swing on over to their website if you want more information.

Now it's time to assemble the unit & give it a test. The first step is to thread the cables through the cable glands.  I have cut two metre lengths of red and black 6mm automotive cable for the pump connection and the same for the battery connection.  I have also included a two metre of figure eight cable to connect to the plug pack.  Thread one length of red and black through one of the glands and the other length of red and black, along with the figure eight, through the other gland.  Pull plenty of cable through to make it easy to assemble, you can shorten this later before tightening the glands.

Now we need to connect the cables to our components.

I'll refer back to the circuit diagram for the connection details.

The cabling is quite straightforward and is done mostly with cheap automotive crimp connectors.  I wont go into the detail of fitting these, if you need a few pointers just drop me a line.  The cable connections are as follows:

• 6mm red from battery connects to the common contact on the relay
• 6mm red to the pump & the red wire to the strobe connect to the normally closed contact on the relay
• Both 6mm black cables and the black wire to the strobe are connected together in a two screw electrical connector
• The trace (with line on sheathing) side of the figure eight connects to the positive coil terminal on the relay
• The non-trace (no line on sheathing)side of the figure eight connects to the negative coil terminal on the relay

Again if you need a few pointers on making the connections just drop me a line.

Now we need to fit off the other ends of the cables. 

Battery Cable:  I simply crimped a set of battery terminal lugs to the two cables that will connect to the battery.

Plug Pack cable:  As I mentioned in part 1 the unit will be controlled by a 12v plug pack I had in the shed.  This presents us with one small consideration.  Whilst most plug packs are configured with the centre pin as positive and the outer as negative this is not always the case.  Usually the pin configuration is shown on the cover of the plug pack.  If this is not the case then a simple test with a multimeter will allow you to work out how the pins are configured.  Fortunately mine had centre positive, outer negative.  You may recall that we connected the trace side of the figure eight cable to the positive coil terminal on the relay.  In order to ensure I wire the relay coil the right way round I need to have the trace side connected to positive on my plug pack.  To acheive this I soldered the trace wire to the centre pin on the plug pack socket and the non-trace to the outer pin.  Thus we have positive inner, negative outer.  If you happen to get this wrong it should not be a disaster, you will not damage your relay it simply will not work.  If the unit fails when you test it be sure to double check the plug pack polarity.

Here you can see the completed plug pack socket next to the plug fitted on the plug pack itself.

Well I'm pleased to say that is pretty much all there is to do.  Carefully pull your cables back through the loosened glands until everything fits neatly in the enclosure.  Tighten the glands up firmly and screw the lid back on to your enclosure.  Don't forget to install the gasket before you put the lid on!

So here we have the finished product, connected to a small bilge pump for testing.

Now it's time to see it in action.  Here's a quick video of our first test!

As this unit has been designed to be pretty weatherproof I will be working on a cheaper indoor version.  I have been approached by a couple of people to build them one of these units so I will soon be posting some details on the pricing if you want to buy a completed backup unit from goanna.com.  All feedback & suggestions are welcome!

We are going to be using aquaponics to grow a large part of our veggies so I want to get cracking with building the system.  The only problem is that there is no point building the system until we have moved!  In order to satisfy my desire to get started I decided to build some of the small components & take them with us.  First off the rank is the relay setup to switch on our battery backup system if the power fails.  Basically the fish in an aquaponics system need oxygen created by constant water movement and aeration.  As this is acheived by electric pumps, no electricity = dead fish.  To overcome this you run a simple 12v pump off a car battery to cover those times when the mains are kaput!  As I only want the 12v system to work when there is no power I need a reliable way to switch it on when the power goes off.  Luckily it's pretty cheap and simple to build one.  My main considerations were; safety, minimum of moving parts, easy to test, no 240v being mixed with the 12v, ease of installation and some sort of visual indication that the power is off.  The devices I have seen tend to use a 240 relay to switch the 12v side of things.  Being a sparkie I'm always wary of mixing 240v with water so I decided to go down a different path.  I, and no doubt many of you, have a heap of now redundant plug pack power supplies from old phones, appliances etc.  As many of these are 12 volt I decided to use one of these to power my unit. Whilst it does add another point of failure to the system, it does recycle the supply which means there is no 240v within cooee of your relay unit.  An additional advantage of this approach means that pretty much anyone in the world can build one of these and recycle a plugpack with their local plug configuration.

So a quick trip to Jaycar got me most of the bits I needed, I'm sure a bit of shopping around would find far cheaper components.  For my unit I purchased:

LA5302 Strobe Light (29.95)

HP0742 Cable Glands (5.45)

HB6126 Enclosure (12.95)

SP0717 Pushbutton Switch (1.95)

SY4074 12v Horn Relay (12.95)

PT4562 Battery Lugs (2.95)

I also had in my shed the necessary plugpack in-line female socket, 12v cable, solder, soldering iron, drill & drill bits required to do the job.

The first job was to mark the enclosure so I could drill the holes required for the strobe lamp, switch and the two cable glands.

The next step was to drill out the marked holes, I won't bore you with pictures of me drilling, here's the finished case after drilling.

Then I installed the test switch & strobe on the case along with the cable glands.

Stay tuned for part two!  Until then here's a quick version of the circuit I'm going to use.