Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I just got an cast iron claw foot bathtub without the claw feet to use as my FT. Its going to be gravity fed into my GBs so I'm going to have to raise it somehow. I'm thinking that building a structure out of 2x4s and 4x4s is my best bet. Anyone have experience building a frame for a VERY heavy bathtub?

i have used all baths in my system. I have one cast iron bath. in my humble opinion use it for something else they are really heavy and would be dangerous if they fell etc. Not to mention getting the thing up on a stand of some sort. use it to raise feeder fish or something.

You could make something kinda like what the barrel ponics manual uses to support the half barrels cut the long way. But I expect you may be better off keeping it on the ground since it is so heavy already.

I suppose I could keep it on the ground. The only reason I'd be raising it is so that the solid lifting overflow would have more of a drop down to the GBs. Its already got a small drop, but it really isn't very far. How much of a drop is needed?

Depends on how long your pipe is, what diameter it is, how many bends you have, what your inflow current is. It's very hard to give an accurate number. The bigger the better imho, but lifting one of those baths... hmmm. I wouldn't.

If you have more than one, maybe you could stack them crossways on top of each other. That may be adequate support.

I ended up just putting it up on some bricks with a 2x8 across the top of them. Works great!

Bricks are good. :-) Hope the 8x2's not radiata pine... may not last too long.

I think they might be douglas fir... but I can't be too sure. I got them as scraps from a friend of mine. Either way I think I'll probably need to figure out something better eventually, but for now this is perfect.