Hello BYAP,
I am half way through building an indoor aquaponics setup consisting of 3 chop-n-flip style 55gal barrels. Because I want to use one large LED grow light, the barrels will be set close together in a triangle to maximize the light accessible to each grow bed.
The last major design question to answer is this: Should these three barrels be run as separate systems, or plumbed together as one large system? Conventional wisdom suggests that minor chemical fluctuations in the water have less impact on larger systems. Additionally, maintenance should be a bit simpler running this as one system (one vs three water tests every time.) Is there a downside or danger that I'm missing?
To accomplish linking these together, the water from one aquarium would pump to the grow bed on the barrel next to it. Then the water would drain through a bell siphon to that aquarium and so on. I got a little carried away with the MS Paint drawing here
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This is a pretty specific scenario so I wanted to make a thread to begin some discussion about the idea. What do you think?
