 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha, I'm Glenn Martinez of Olimana Gardens and this is Ms. Natalie Cash, my assistant and the farm manager. She helped me out a lot, not only with the show but the farm, it's good stuff. And she prepared a program for you guys today that we did down in Australia and it was labeled in the 18 reasons to use airlift pumps. A lot of people just get hung up on it, you know, what is it about? So I like to show that what most people are using are little pumps like this. And these little pumps are called submersible pumps. Basically they sit inside the water and the electricity is going out. Now that's a little bit of a problem because you got electricity in water. Our biggest problem is people, particularly children, tend to pick it up by the cord. They pull the cord out and then that breaks the seals, oil come out, or you feel that you see the fish swim over by the pump and we see them swim funny and then they go away. They come back, they swim funny and they go away. There's an electrical short in here, okay? And because of potential danger, somebody's taking their hand in the water and being injured, they make us use things like GFIs and that. So what we want to talk about is getting rid of the submersible pumps. We virtually do not use any submersible pumps. Not at all. The only time we're going to use one on the farm is if we're going to set it inside of a pump, a tank to pump it out on the ground like we're doing a field day cleanup, okay? But some want to go over some of the benefits of it, okay, that we do want to do. And one is their lower cost. When we go lower cost to do install costs, the problem, all of this thing with airlift, with us at all amount of gardens started with Waikiki Elementary School. They got a grant for $2,500. And so we designed an acute educational system for them, a 175 gallon water tank, to grow beds, to float beds, to bucket siphons and everything. And then they said, oh, but we're not going to be right next to a building where there's electricity. It's going to be out, not in the playground, but in the yard. And the electrician wanted $2,500 for a licensed electrical contractor to dig down, bust through the concrete and then trench 18 inches deep and then come up and then put a GFI receptacle and all that with it. So they were going to use their money. They had the first year to install a lonely little outlet out in the middle of the yard. And we would wait until next year, they would apply for another grant and then we go on. We said, no, no, no, no. We'll design an aquaponic system that doesn't need electricity out in the yard. And that's when we started down the road with the airlift pump. So what we end up doing is you have a, you know, so these are little commercial pumps. You see here a little, the cost of commercial. See the little filter there? Well, guess what gets clogged? So imagine me trying to tell a school teacher she has to go out every day and pull the pump up and clean it and put it back in. And once a week, she has to disassemble it. Good luck to anybody telling the school teacher of elementary kids or higher that they have another chore to do, a daily chore. It's not going to happen. On the other hand, our airlifts go through and we virtually never clean them. Okay. The smallest pipe is a one inch pipe. So everything just goes through. So we don't have any filters to clean and we pump the solids out of the fish tank. Now one thing to keep in mind, if you have a little pump like that and it has a little foam thing in there, it's going to clog up. So yeah, you clean it every day, but it clogs up. The problem is all the fish poop is staying in the tank. It's not being taken out. On the other hand, we put a hole in the side of the fish tank, come out, put a well in, call a sump well. We dig a hole with a post flow digger about two feet deep. And we put the pump and we drop my airlift in it and it pumps all that stuff out and up into the cinder beds or the filters where you get rid of it. So our fish tank, we don't have to do the annual cleaning of the fish tank anymore because it's just never dirty. So by not doing the electrical, all we have to do now, we bought a bunch of little child-sized pigs. We had the school kids pick a little thing about a ditch about two inches wide, about two inches deep, right across the yard. Then we put a PVC in there and we put the dirt in the grass and kept saying green side up, green side up. And we put it back in. And then because we didn't need any permits because it was just an empty piece of PVC pipe which we hooked up with a garden hose fitting to the air compressor. It is still running. We've never had a service call from anybody for an airlift. We've been doing them for eight years now and we don't have any service contracts or anything because you're pretty much done. You're in there. So one of the things we mentioned is when the electrician went out there he had to put the GFI up there. I think we have a picture of that, the GFI receptacle. And that has the little reset button in the test button. You see there it says test monthly. You see that? Who does it? Does anybody go in their bathroom or their garage and test that monthly? If you don't test it monthly it's not going to work the day you need it. It has to be exercised and going back and forth. Now a lot of people hate these things because you plug into them and they trip off. And for some kind of no apparent reason. It's a high humidity day or whatever. Or the cord is too long and the inductance trips it off. So you can get a lot of false tripping. Now it's the only thing in America that's designed to save your life and electrical is a ground fault interrupter. Okay? They say about all the breakers. Well, they protect the wiring in the house from catching fire. So indirectly they save lives. That's what the national electrical code is about. But when you take these a little out of it. But you see that a little out of it. Now the next slide is going to show you. If you want to put it out in the yard you've got to put it in a weatherproof enclosure. The weatherproof enclosure, that little lexan cover costs more than the receptacle does. Okay? So you open it up and you put it in. But you can't use the flat one. The kind where it's weatherproof except when you open it you plug the cord because then you're not weatherproof anymore. So you see the inherent problem. For us in the school year, guess when it trips all by itself. When you're not there. When you're not there. On a four-day weekend. Or what happens to Easter break or Christmas break. These things will trip off and they'll be there. So the teacher comes back to all dead fish. And we have gone to some schools changing out dead fish, right? There's like a little kid dropping ice cream cone. What you're going to do, right? And so we get them set up. So he said, you know what? Now when I do my air. And we have a little air pumps. A little air compressor pumps going. And this is a typical one. Haco is one of our favorite brands. They're very quiet. They're available all over the place. And another brand name is Metella. And by doing those, they hum. They hum so quietly. We put them in classrooms and we have no complaint. In fact, the only complaint we have is they asked me to put a light on it. So the teacher can see across the room, a visual confirmation is running. Otherwise she has to walk back and actually touch it to feel it going or to look outside. So a lot of our air lift pumps, you're going to see we put clear pipes. So they see the water going up and down, right? And what's good about those pumps too is it's so quiet. You don't hear the pump, but you can hear the water running. You hear the water. That's all you hear is the waterfall, right? The other thing is when you use these little submersible pumps, these little guys like this, the hose goes here and then it has a hook wherever it's going to go to. And a lot of times you don't see where the water is going in. So you have no visual indication that the water is being pumped until you have dead fish. And that's when you find out, quote, what went wrong in that. And that one of the things really cute about the air lift pumps too is we don't want the kids going out there pulling these up by the electrical cords for obvious reasons, right? And we're not going to have them disassemble it to clean the filter and put it back together. But my air lift pump, they're just a piece of like one-inch pipe inside of a two-inch pipe dropped into a little sump well or in the side of the tank. The kids take them out, hose them off, put them back in. There is nothing to break. There are no moving parts. So it has a really great thing. The other one is the virtually maintenance free. Because they're PVC, they pump salt water. We do salt water in the aquaponics system. They do fresh water, no problem at all. And oddly enough, a guy came from India, wanted to license my technology, and he took it to India. And I said, oh, you're doing aquaponics? And he was a little shy. He says, no, I do sewage system. We love your pumps. And they do four, six, and eight-inch pipes using my air lifts because it pumps the sewage and it aerates it, and they don't have to clean them. You can see the obviousness there, right? So by having no moving parts, in fact, we only have one pump, the burper pump. And its only moving part is a little check out. It just goes back and forth, right? That's it. And they're rated to pump human sewage up a hill and not come back to last 20 to 40 years. So an aquaponics will probably outlive us all. We've never replaced one. Not yet. Not yet. And so in eight years, the other one is, oddly enough, we went to Florida, and we're visiting down there a place called Morningstar. They train missionaries to go overseas to the very serious training facility doing aquaponics. That guy comes up and gives me a big man, almost picks me up off the ground and says, you've changed our life. I said, how's that? And he says, well, the way you separate the stock, I had no clue what he was talking about. I said, well, show me how you're doing it. So he brings me over and he shows me his big fish tanks and they took black pipe, polypropylene pipe, the irrigation type pipe, and they cut quarter inch slits and they put it all the way around the fish tank and they put it just below the surface. So when the babies are born, they go into the surface and normally you and I are out there with nets chasing around. We got to save them before they become breakfast, right? Well, what happens is a little fish came up and they ran into the slot all the way around and my airlift picked it up, threw it into a 55 gallon aquarium that was sitting on a table right next to the tank, and then that tank overflowed back to the fish tank, but it had a screen to keep the babies from going back in. So you pump the babies up, the babies don't bother them at all, and then you catch them. So they come out. They got 1,500 little babies in the morning. You and I were out there with little nets. Maybe we catch 100 or 200, right? So it did a lot better. The other one is that we do it with shrimp. When they do shrimp, they put that same black pipe on the bottom of the tank because shrimp are down on the bottom crawling around. They would go into it. Again, we would lift them out and that. Which reminds me of a story I went out to the North Shore here in Linda Gussman. We helped her do a harvest in that and she was really sweet. She sold me a whole bunch of baby shrimp. And what were they? 25 cents a piece, I think? So I bought $100 worth. It's 100 bucks. I got all these little baby shrimp. We come home. We put them in a 55 gallon aquarium. We bought little baby shrimp food for them and everything. And they started growing. First, you could hardly see them. The monkeys. Then they started growing up. And then you watch a larger one about three-quarter inch. We would sit there on a rock. And the little ones come by and go, Hi, Uncle. Have you seen them? And he'd eat them. And they would come by. And we watched him grow every day. Well, my $100 worth of baby shrimp, when I got all done at the end of it, I had 15 large shrimp. That was it. You know? But you started with $400. Yeah, well, it didn't quite work out the way we planned, right? No, I didn't. So what we found out, was that we were going to separate them. And so we used these. So the little ones will run and hide. And then we'll pump them over and keep them in their separate tank so they don't get all eaten up. One of the things also is when people run submersible pumps or like swimming pool pumps, it becomes economics. Like, people will come by and they gave me a swimming pool pump. Just a gift. Glam on my contractor. We took out his running. So we plug it in. That thing pumped water. But then it used 12 amps. And we did a little spreadsheet. We got out our electric bill and we divided the number of kilowatt hours we got charged into the money into how many kilowatts we used. And it came up to about 34 cents a kilowatt hour. Okay? So if you look at it, so every thousand watts, you know, is going to be 34 cents. So anyway, you do the math and we made a little Excel spreadsheet and we share up on our web page. And it shows you look at any device and if it says it uses half an amp, you run your finger down half an amp and it says how many days a month are you going to do it? Well, most of us are running things 24 hours a day for 30 months. You come across and it tells you it's going to cost you $30 a month to run that pump. One amp. But wait a minute. The swimming pool pump was 12 amps. So it's going to be 12 times 30. Oh my gosh. So when I got my first $400 electric bill, we unplugged that pump. We had to go down and buy a small pump, a much smaller pump to put in but it wouldn't pump the volume. So then we added the air and the air helped lift the water and by using the pump and the air we cut our bill down and now we're running the whole farm for $87 a month. You know, $87, $88 a month a month. So tremendous savings. Okay. Plus that I'm not burning out the expense of pump. Okay. Because I got the one free. But anybody here in swimming pools know swimming pool pumps are a bit dear in price. It's getting the $600 and $700 range. Okay. But even when somebody gives me something, if it uses that much energy, that's the hidden cost. And actually when we go and visit people and we go and they have a beautiful waterfall scenery there. They're not running their pumps. When we get there, then they turn their water pump on to make the waterfall work because they only can run it for a short time. Yeah, we were down in Kona at some rich people's houses, okay? Very high-end people. And they went and turned on the pumps so we could see the things running because each pump was costing $1,500 a month to run the pump. So they start putting them on timers. In fact, we have clients here in Kanoi up in Haiku Plantation that when they go walking down, the gentleman flips the switch on. Well, people say, what was that? So he had me come over and put a motion detector. So now when they come walking down the walkway, it detects them. Instead of turning on a light, it turns on the pump. So the water's just coming down the mountain when they get out to the waterfall. And as they leave, it turns off. It times off. He has it set to run for 30 minutes and that's it. Now, that's a shame, folks, when you can't afford to run your equipment like that. Now, see this? This is pumping solids. This is pretty fantastic stuff because the smallest pipe we use is one end. Whatever will fit through the pipe. And this is a two-inch one here. Natalie just poured in a whole bucket of beads and four-inch-long pieces of yarn. And this is pumping up. She's holding the camera sideways and it's going up just to be vertical. And that, they give you a little seasick. And you see it coming around? All that stuff goes right around the corner. No problem at all. No clogging. So you see the green hose there? That's the air coming in. So it's a green hose inside of a two-inch pipe, blowing air to only two PSI. I mean, a balloon has more pressure in it. And it pumps up all that garbage around and around and around. No clogging. How long would a submersible pump like this last? Oh, not even that. Yeah. One cinder style. And it stops. Instantly. Yeah. So that's a big one. The other one is we, if you have a pump and it's pumping the water up, if it can't go any higher, you would literally have to put the water in a bucket and buy another pump and then pump it up higher and then buy another pump, right? What we do is have one air pump at the bottom and it will pump it up. And then when that one's full, it pumps it to the next on the next. But there's only one air pump at the bottom. And that is because air doesn't care about gravity. I can pump air from the ground to the top of a 50 story building. And my air pump doesn't work any harder pumping it up than it would be going sideways. That's right. Amazing. It's amazing thing. So by air being gravity free, that's a big blessing. You pump water up 50 stores. That's one big massive pump you're going to have to have. Oh, yeah. And that, yeah. So we take a little break here and share a good message with you. So we'll be right back. Thank you. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. No, we can't. Oh, yeah. If I had, if he'd whispered, he's going to play the video. I would have, if he, you know, but I'll take my eye on the monitor's camera. Yeah. Great. And maybe we can do it. Yeah, we'll listen to it. Yeah, yeah. That one is what? What was the next one? The slow motion? Oh, the slow motion, yeah. Yeah. No, the slow motion is silent. It's silent. Silent? It's silent. Yeah, I'll just talk over it. Yeah. Yeah, I'll do this at the end. Remember what we said that we agreed to it? Yeah. Because I want to get through the 18 and then use it whatever time. Okay. All right. Aloha. Here we are back. I appreciate y'all tuning in to Stink Tech Hawaii. Natalie Cash here with me. We missed the beginning. I'm Glenn Martinez of Allumonic Gardens. And we're going through about 18 reasons. And the reasons are growing. The list is growing. Why do you use an airlift over doing these little submersible pumps? Okay. Keep in mind we do an airlift. There's a little air compressor sitting on a shelf higher than whatever the water is. And just a garden hose comes out and it works. Okay. So there's no electricity in our aquaponic garden. The safety feature there is awesome. Plus I do not need to plug it into a GFI because it's inside. It's out of the rain. There's no problem. So we skip that whole construction cost and all of that. It goes with it. But you're talking about one airlift can feed the next airlift. We were down in Dumagheti in the Philippines. It's an agricultural college. In fact, Dumagheti is a college town. There's five or six major colleges there. So it is a straight up educational place. Well, land prices there have gone through the roof. When you have so much going there and it's all built up. So when I say built up, now they're going up. And so what happened is most of their college campus with two-story buildings with green metal roofs on them or moanier tile roofs, they went up and they took off the roof, exposed the building. You look right in the classroom, then they put scaffolding across and tin and then they poured concrete and they made a concrete roof. Then they waterproofed the roof and then they, so I've got a flat roof now from the second-story roof and then they put a greenhouse on top of that and they want to do aquaponics and nursery. They're agriculture colleagues. And they teach teachers. That's their primary thing. So what they did then is we had the fish tanks down on the ground because they had 3,000 gallon tanks. Each 1,000 gallon tank weighs about 8,000 pounds. So no way is that going on the roof. So they built the concrete tanks on the ground, dug a hole right next to one of the fish tanks. They dumped and put an empty pipe in there, connected the fish tank. So when I got there, I had a pipe going 8 feet down in the ground. I stuck my airlift in it and my airlift took it up to about 20 feet. Ah, but I had to get to 34 feet. So all we did is put another turbo blaster on top of it. And a turbo blaster is, let's say if you had a one-inch pipe coming up, I would put a coupling on and then I would inject air a second time and I can boost it and we took it right up to the next level. So it just kept going and going. That's a little turbo blaster there. So the water would come in the bottom, the garden hose fitting the air would come in it, and the part there by my thumb, it would be air and water coming up. Now the electric pump starts running real easy because it's not feeling the weight of the water because the air is making it so much lighter. It takes it so much higher. And the pump does what it never could have done otherwise. So typically we will take a little pump like this, one of these, and we put it in. If you put it in your pond, let's say your pond is 18 inches to 20 inches of water, this could only pump water about 5 feet high. That's all and it just stops, right? So we hook it up on a clear piping to show you going up to there. Then I put that turbo blaster on there and I turn on the air and I take it to 30 feet. Same little pump, but by adding the air it feeds it up and the pump makes up for the water being so shallow. Now my preferred way is to drill a hole in the side of the tank. But a lot of places we go, they're metal tanks, they're corrugated steel, or they're concrete tank, or they've got plastic linings. Really hard to come inside ways with the waterproof fitting, right? And so you can do a combination. So if you do have a pump, if you add my air lift on top of it, the turbo blaster, you take it to new heights. Going on up, okay? Now the other thing I wanted to do is that when you do just a water pump, you get pure water. There is no air racing involved, okay? When you do the water pump and you add the air, we have a great video we're going to be showing you in slow motion a little bit here, and it will go up and it bubbles and it falls back and it bubbles and falls back. You'll see that in a little bit. Let's see, the verticals easily supply the grow towers. Are you familiar with the grow towers? These guys here, we can put a little tiny aquarium pump, a quarter inch to into that water there, pump the water up and it dribbles all the way back down. No moving parts whatsoever. Now when you buy those little things like what you're looking at right there, they're $800 to $1,000 each one of those towers. Now they do grow a lot of food, but they got a weakness. There's a little mechanical pump, like the little submersible pump on the bottom. Yes, what? You have to open up the access hole to get to it. You got to clean it out at least every week, okay? And there's no fish in this system. That's pure hydroponic. That's just chemicals, right? And when you do hydroponics, that's called chemigation. They normally have chemical A and chemical B, okay? Basically you NPK, you know, going, and they go back and forth one, one day, one the other day, okay? But there are no living things in there, okay? They don't want, but no matter what you do, you're going to get little bits of roots and other matter and get down to the tank, right? Yeah. Yeah, so as soon as they do these kind of tanks, they can't have the fish. We can come, put the fish in there, and all you do is open up the access hole and feed your fish. And it will pump the water all the way up the top and it comes down totally self-contained aquaponic system. Quite delightful, okay? The other one to talk about is the lower repair cost. When that aquapump, it's only about this big, you know, and that, I think we have a slide showing the parts of the rubber parts that go inside. There you go. You go down to our favorite store is Aquaponics Place here in Waimanalo. There's the Aquaponics Store for a while. As far as I know, the only Aquaponics Store, you buy that little kit depending on what size, anywhere from $15 to $40. But it fixes a $200 air compressor, okay? And if you go down there, if you bring your pump in and you set it on the counter, this is Aquaponics Place in Waimanalo, by Waimanalo feed store at the back side. You set your pump down. You pay for the parts and the guy installs them. He sure does. I give the guy $5 or $10, but my goodness, he just sits there in between customers and he fixes my pump and I pick it up the next day. You know, sometimes I'm in a rush. I just grab the parts and go home because when I get home, I turn the pump over. I only got four screws. The lid comes off. Then there's four little nuts. They're useful in that driver and they change those rubber parts out, okay? Now, the manufacturer recommends change every year. We change when they break. And we do. Yeah, we have... We do. Yeah. The change in ahead of time would avoid you not being run. But normally, we have two in every tank, you know, on it. Because what you find is kind of odd. It's cheaper to buy two 60-watt pumps than it is one 120-watt pump. Plus, inherently, by having two small pumps, one goes out, the other one's still gone. You know, my fish now can be happy, but they're not dead, right? So that's a biggie for it. But the service life, these little submersible pumps we have, because of the cinder we use particularly, or anybody using grappling and aquaponics, it comes through and that sand gets through the little grill on the outside and it gets in there and it destroys them. There's very few pumps. These submersible pumps here, they sit there in the water and they pick off the junk off the bottom of your tank. That's where all the garbage is and you pump it over, okay? And that's, again, electricity in the water, a no-no for us. What about your aeration for your water flow? Oh, yeah. The mechanical pump's not aerating you at all. It's up to wherever it pumps the water to, when it falls, you get it. But you get that no matter how you did it. But one of the things, the big one is, when my air pumps run dry, in other words, if I have it coming over and have the little pipe coming up the side or a drum, if that water in the fish tank gets below the overflow level, well, my pump's going to be dry. Electrical, you've got to have little switches. It was in that last picture, they had a little rubber bulb on the side. And when the water goes down, it turns off, okay? That will save your electrical pump. Of course, it's another $20 to $50 for that little switch. Ours, and then it has to fill up to a certain level before it will turn on. That's its operational rate. Ours run right down to us, there's no water and as soon as there's a little bit of water, it starts running again. Because it's just air going through it too. There's no moving parts, so we don't kill things. But do we have that slow motion? You remember what that one was? The video of the slow motion. Folks, what you see here is the aeration coming up an airlift pump. Take a look at it. That is just pure beautiful. We're doing this one in slow motion so you can see how the air and the water are so mixed together. The air is going to go out the top of the pipe, the water is going out to the left, and you see it going down that left-hand white pipe and gushing out at the base of a tomato plant there. So that whole center bed will be going green. There's just a little test show set up we did. We'd like to have some clear pipe so you can just see the action live. Come out with your oxygen meter and the water in the fish tank is only three parts per million, okay? Five is where you want to go. We turn on the air pump, it pumps up, it comes over, and it's at six parts per million. Now to be scientific, we took the submersible pump, we put it in, we pumped the water up to the bucket, and it came up three, and it was still three. And it will always be three. There's nothing to change it. So, tool of the day, Natalie always likes to have a tool. This is something you all buy at the hardware stores. These are the little timers. You crank them in your time-up. This I want to share with you. When you're in places and you get yourself a little pressure reducer, you hook this up to the faucet and this this will last forever. If you'll reduce the pressure, you don't break the little gears. Anyway, that's about it for us this week. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for turning in. Think Tecawaii where you learn something new every day. Thank you. Every day.