Christmas Giveaway

Win an efergy Shower Timer

Would you like a Christmas gift from the Trafford Eco-House?

Thanks to ecooutlet we’ve got an efergy Shower Timer to give away. To be in with a chance to win you just need to signed up to get our updates by email – if you’re not already getting email updates from us just click here to subscribe. 

We’ll draw the competition on December 23rd, and you’ll need to pop in to the Trafford Eco-House to pick up your prize – good luck!

We’ve currently got one of these on test too – expect a review soon!

 

Welcome to the Trafford Eco-House

Hi there, and welcome to the website for the Trafford eco-house, our little patch of 3-bed pre-war eco heaven in sunny Sale, south-west Manchester. To ensure you don’t miss any of our successes or failures you can click here and get updates by email or follow our eco-nattering on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TraffordEco.

You can find out what the Trafford eco-house is all about on the About page, and don’t forget to have a look at what our partners are up to: Urban Grown and Trafford Council.

 

Testing Manchester’s water

Ok, now this post is going to be really techie, feel free to switch off unless you’ve been passionately following our Aquaponics system development. Before we can put fish into the system we need to make sure that the environment they’re going into is safe for them.

This means it needs to have:

• The right pH – not too high or too low, it seems 6-8 is about right.
• Enough Oxygen in the water – Trout need more than 5.5 ppm.
• No ammonia – any ammonia added needs to be converted into Nitrite & Nitrate by the bacteria in the growbeds.
• The right temperature – for trout this is less than 25°C and warmer than frozen solid!
• No chlorine or chloramine (often present in tap water)

With that in mind I set about testing the water that we’d just filled the tanks with – Manchester tap water. If you’re interested, you can see the test results below:

 

Come & see Ed Miliband in Manchester

We’ll be there!

 

The big Aquaponic growbeds are in!

Hot on the heels of starting the ‘cycling’ of the Aquaponics system using the small beds around the edge, the big central growbeds are going in. Here’s how they have progressed:

And final one for the night – the growbeds in place, drainage fittings all complete, and the gravel starting to go in. They are going to need a LOT of gravel – I foresee a week of shifting gravel coming up

 

More Growbeds done & Aquaponics is ‘cycling’!

There we go – the growbeds on the long side are all done, the drains are all connected, and they’re plumbed in to the fish tank. And we’ve finally taken the plunge – the pump is now running automatically, once an hour:

Now I just need to start keeping an eye on the Ammonia readings to see how our bacteria are going – I guess they’ll be growing VERY slowly this week wth the frost we’ve been having.

 

Frosty Polytunnel and Allotment

No problem with mud in the garden this morning, it went down to -1.7°C last night in the garden, and even the inside of the polytunnel was down to -1°C.

The ground in the garden is pretty solid now, but has remained a little soft in the polytunnel. The cold snap has seen the water temperature drop from 9°C down to 7°C.

Here’s how the ‘allotment’ is going:

The onions, garlic and purple-sprouting  broccoli should be all frost hardy, so let’s see how they go!

The frost patterns on the inside of the polytunnel are pretty amazing, not sure I’ve ever seen anything like this:

 

 

Free Shrubs!

As we get ready for our new orchard there are a few casualties of our new planting – all the attractive, but ultimately unproductive, shrubs at are in the way. They’ve got to go and so far I haven’t found any takers – if you want one just let us know on the contact page and you can come down and dig one up to take away. Now is the  perfect time to transplant shrubs, so what are you waiting for!

Here are some piccies to tempt you:

 

Energy-Saving Security Lighting

With the nights closing in we really need good lighting in the poytunnel so that we can keep working on the aquaponic system in the evenings. After a fair bit of research I found the perfect solution – low-energy security lighting. We’ve now got two of these lighting the tunnel, they’re only 36w each but give the same amount of light as standard 150w security lamps, we bought them online from TLC for £17.99 each.

 I’m pretty impressed with them so far: they come on quickly, and throw a good amount of light .We’ve got them secured to the ridge pole of the tunnel so that they throw the most light possible – and here’s the result:

 

Starting to ‘Cycle’ the aquaponics

We’ve made some major progress on the Aquaponics in the last couple of weeks, and now I’m getting ready to start ‘cycling’ the system. This is what you need to do to build up the colonies of beneficial bacteria in the growbeds that will clean the water once we have added the fish. To minimise the risk to the fish you do this cycling ‘fishless’, by adding ammonia manually to the water. Once the bacteria are going well they will feed off this ammonia, turning it into nitrates for the plants. Without the bacteria, ammonia in the fish water would quickly reach a fatal level, so we need to have the bacteria well established before we add any fish.

We’re going to start cycling the completed side of the aquaponics system while I complete the plumbing and gravel-washing on the other sections, and here is the completed side:

Now you can see the plumbing all connected it hopefully makes more sense: The water overflows from the fish tank at the back into the dark grey pipes which feed each growbed. The water then slowly drains through holes in the bottom of the growbeds into the white return pipe, which returns it to the sump.

I’ve connected up the pump too. It’s quite an impressive beast:

What’s even more impressive is the flow from it – the pipe in the photo is 38mm (1.5″):

So now I just have to get the bacteria to build up and we’ll be ready for the fish – I might even start to plant some seeds in the beds while we’re waiting.

 

Switching to Low-Energy lightbulbs

Apart from two light fittings, all of the bulbs in our house are traditional incandescents. And there are lots of them. Tackling them all at once would be a mammoth task, so we’re going at it in a piecemeal fashion. Now that the evenings are drawing in we’re using the lights in the house a lot more, and I think they’re starting to become a significant drain on our electricity consumption.

My first spot to start was the bathroom. This has three – yes three – recessed light fittings. That makes it sound palatial, but it’s not. What it is is unbearably bright. Each fitting takes a full-size “R80” 100 watt reflector bulb. Luckily these had been progressively blowing, so at point of replacement we only had one running, and the light in the room was adequate, although poorly spread.

After some detailed online research I gave up and went to B&Q. Quite a lot of money later I had three Megaman 11W R63 reflector bulbs – each one equivalent to a 60W conventional bulb. I went for the slightly smaller, lower-powered R63 size because I new that three 100W-equivalent bulbs would be far too bright.

Putting them in was easy; the bulbs fitted perfectly and didn’t protrude from the ceiling. Turning them on was a little less impressive. Startup is a little slow, with them remaining dim for a little too long for my liking. Once they are all going though they are impressively bright – in fact if they’d had more of a choice I might have been tempted to go for something closer to 8W (40W equivalent). Still, even with these three, we’ve reduced the wattage in the bathroom from 300W to 33W – that should help our electricity bills a little, be a good step towards our 10:10 target, and make us a little more solar-ready.