My Silly Pondcam – Post 21

We had a pondcam scare earlier this evening. I was at my parents house and I couldn’t connect to it. I didn’t see an alert that it went down, so I assumed nothing was really wrong. If water got in it, I would receive an email from my monitor. that would simply say “pondcam is down”. Since I didn’t get one, I wasn’t too worried. When I got home I can see my whole network was down. We had a power surge and it knocked a cheap switch that connects my firewall offline. I rebooted it and checked pondcam. Still up… Still works. Tested the light… that works OK too.

I called my sister earlier today to tell her she needs to login to pondcam and take a look in case it gets water in the case again. She waited until 7PM and it looked like it was down. I get a one line email from her at 7:03PM, it reads “I can’t believe pondcam is down! Argh!”. I happily wrote her back… Pondcam was up… My network was down. I arrogantly smile and think to myself, “Pondcam and PONDNET could end up being the most reliable network around… If it doesn’t spring a leak”. Since I turned pondcam loose on Sunday night, I have been involved in probably 3 or 4 outages of some kind for customers and just tonight, myself. Pondcam however has remained stable and up. Even all night long… Which is really weird. All of those power problems we had in post 2 were because of batteries that were dead. It totally screws up my understanding of the power part and why it seems to be working so well.

Let’s get back to an actual problem for a moment. For those of you that have bothered to login to pondcam can see something right away… The water is very very cloudy. And we had a thunderstorm tonight, so I am sure the agricultural runoff I get wont help the clarity. I can’t do much about the water quality, but I can do something.

I have a windmill that connects to two diffusers (think of them as a big giant bubbler). The problem is two things…1) it isn’t windy in August. 2) There are trees around it and it really only works well in the middle of winter.

One of the reasons the water is cloudy is because of plankton. I don’t know this off of the top of my head, I know a guy that knows a heck of a lot more about ponds than I do that I called today. If I can aerate the pond, I am hoping to fill it with so much oxygen that no plankton, algae, or any other plant that clouds the water will not survive.

I take some hose, some pliers and some electrical tape out to the aerator for my septic tank. I fit the hose on so it looks like this.

1-aerator-with-hose

I then connect hose after hose, then another hose, then about 75 ft of tubing that I bought three years ago. I finally reach the windmill and plug it into the two difussers. Here is what the connection looks like at the base of the windmill.

2-connection-to-windmill

Now let’s see what that looks like.

3-bubbles-the-good-kind

I have no idea how long that will have to go before it starts to clear the water. I can only leave that there for a week or so because I don’t want to risk the septic tank having a problem. I do think of another thing I can do to clear things up. Last summer we had a terrible drought and I worried that the fish would die because the water was getting really low (Kind of like it is now). I basically started running water into it from my house. My well pump for the house is really good. I left the host running for two weeks straight last year and it didn’t do anything to the water pressure in my house, but it did seem to contribute to clearer water. So… I do that. I just stick a hose into a drain on the other side of my driveway that leads to the pond. I will have to let all of this run for a few days to see if it makes a difference.

For now I am having fun with pondcam. I can’t get the video recording to work for some reason, but the motion detection where it sends a copy of a picture when it sees motion has been really interesting. It sent 6500 pictures to a network drive for me to review. I looked at a bunch of them and here is the best one I could find (Yes… 6500 pictures is a lot… And this is the best I could find).

4-best-picture

That gives you an idea of how cloudy the water is. I want to fix that. Pondcam wants that too.

One Thought on “My Silly Pondcam – Post 21

  1. Murky Fish says “I’m ready for my closeup Mr. Joe!”

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