Just in the nick of time

Well, it rained last night. Rained pretty well. Here in East Texas we needed it pretty bad. Hopefully it rains more tonight. This rain will also, hopefully, solve my problems with chlorine. I have 3 55 gallon drums set up next to the gutters of our house. I was able to collect about 140 gallons of rain water last night. So I spent the morning dumping out the fish killing water and resupplying my tank with rain water. I used rainwater once but it was so full of algae it wasn't any good. This time it's pretty clean and I plan to keep the tank away from sunlight to avoid algae buildup.

The rain solved one of my problems, but alas, I have one more to contend with. I've had this problem from the beginning but haven't put much effort into solving it until I had the water situation figure out. Well, now it's time to solve it. My automation isn't going to work the way I want it to. The float I purchased can't be set to turn the pump off and on when I want it to. I can set it to turn the pump on when it's full, but by the time the float turns it off I'll have way too much water in the beds. I can set it to turn off right where I want it but it won't turn back on. I've fiddled with it for a few hours and have come to the conclusion that I need a different style float. I was trying to go cheap and now this is the price I pay. Hopefully I can use the float I have in a different application on the next system I build.

I also plan to build a filter using activated carbon to filter out chlorine in my water. I got the idea from a response to a post I put on DIY Aquaponics. I have the design figured out, and it shouldn't cost too much to build. If the activated carbon can filter out the chloramine in my water, I can use the hose in the future. For now I have enough water stored in a 55 gallon drum to do any topping off I need for a while.

The rain also did one more thing. It helped the trees around here to drop a TON of leaves. I'm gonna spend some time this week raking and blowing leaves onto a new compost pile. This compost pile will be HUGE by the time I'm done with it.