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Could Joel or someone else explain how his "Blue Barrel System" posted in the members systems functions i.e. starting at the top and working down. The picture is nice but I can't seem to get my mind around it and hope someone would be kind enough to discuss each component of the loop.
TX had a similar block so I PMed Joel and this is what he said...
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Right, the white bucket at the top, and the black box at the end of the gravel beds boith perform the same function, they are both distributor boxes for distributing the water evenly to the barrels... The white one on top has nine fittings siliconed into the bottom of the bucket, one is the inlet from the pump while the others all have 20cm lengths of black risers screwed into them... The risers all have their ends cut off on a 45 degree angle.. The idea of this bucket is to ditribute the water evenly to all of the top barrels, there is a thread on here somwhere where it was discussed in depth with pics, just have to find it though..
The water is pumped from the fish tank up to a T piece, from here the water goes two ways, over to the gravel barrel beds, and up to the tiered section.
The multi tiered section is for yabbies and duck weed and these all stay full of water all the time, with excess water over flowing from the top ones into the bottom, and from the bottom ones back into the fish tank. The barrels need to stay full of water for the duckweed and azolla..
The gravel bed side of things has a distribution box to distribute the water to all of the beds evenly, then they each have an auto syphon in the beds... so the pump is running continuously...
... Because you want the water to go to each of the 7 barrels at a reasonably similar rate.. You certainly don't want it all going to a couple and not the others... If Id run just a pipe up there, with a T piece off for each top half barrel, the first couple would get all the water and the last few would get none.. I had a choice of putting in taps to throttle the first few back a bit, but decided that the distributor box would be easier.
So in the first pic you can see (from the back) the three layers of barrels...
Top layer is fed from the pump up the black vertical black tubing into the white "distribution" bucket and then "teed" off to each of the top grow beds....
These in turn feed the second layer of barrels via the black tubing (at top of top grow beds) which overflows into the second layer of barrels which grows yabbies and duckweed....
In turn this second layer overflows (through the black tubing) into the white stormwater pipe which returns to the pump.
The third layer of barrels are worm farms....
The second half of the system (second picture - two levels of barrels) is feed from the pump to the black distribution box and then to the top level of grow beds which drain by "loop" auto-siphons (black tubing) into the white stormwater piping back to the tank.
The lower layer of barrels are worm farms.
Hope this helps ... and hope I got it right Joel
PS ... Joel has since replaced the black tubing overflows, from the top level grow beds, with larger diameter white pvc piping to increase the flow rate
Backyard Aquaponics
