Bob,
Here's a couple of thoughts.....
If you have a circulating water pump hooked up to a micro
bubble venturi you can put an inline heater on the water line and it will gently
raise the temperature of the water. The water pump will circulate the
water and will break fungi and bacteria loose from the compost material.
The micro bubble venturi I have been looking at will put a lot of disolved
oxygen into the water and the air bubbles will stay suspended in the water for
hours. The venturi I have in mind has large holes in it and will not clog
up. The compost can be put in a 5 gallon container (a bucket) and
submerged and held down and the water output can be directed into that
container. One can contain the compost in a large paint filtering bag to
keep the large particles from getting out into the water. The bucket can
have a bunch of holes in it to let the good guys out. The micro bubbles
will spread all through the water and make it look like milk from all the air
suspended in the water. The circulating water pump will solve the
agitation / extraction problem and the suspended micro bubbles will easily
saturate the whole container and solve the dissolved oxygen problem and it would
solve the problem of keeping air in the tea until it can be applied. In
fact, this kind of tea will have lots of air in it when it is sprayed on the
soil and the air will go down into the soil with the water. Then more air
will be available to the critters living in the soil.
The main benefit of this design is the
air remains suspended in the tea. This kind of technology has
been around in the sewer treatment industry for a number of years. If you
look at a device called an aerobe-a-jet, a bit too pricy for my wallet, you will
find a micro bubble generator that can saturate thousands of gallons of
water. Their smallest sized model might work with some compost tea users
who want to brew fairly large containers of tea. Add a water pump for
agitation and a lot of current problems with making tea will simply go
away. The micro bubble venturi I have in mind will cost a lot less and
will also generate a lot of 20 micron sized bubbles that stay in
suspension. The aerobe-a-jet doesn't circulate water. It just pushes
out a bunch of 20 micron bubbles to saturate the water with air. With
compost tea making we need the circulation to break the bacteria and fungi
loose... but not too violent. I think a water pump could do that just
fine.
Anyone have any suggestions about a suitable water pump?
Brand, make, model? Different sizes for different volumes of CT
tanks?
--Thomas Giannou
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