Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I found this bass in the 3-D warehouse. He's really big when you get him, so you have to scale him down a lot.

Yep, it should give you some good data. *grin*

I know these were just sketches to show layout and such.

But I'm gonna say it anyway...
Make sure your gravity drain plumbing is big. The plumbing from your fish tank to the grow beds since it is gravity drain, needs to be fairly large in comparison to the pipe from the pump up to the fish tank. And then the plumbing that the grow beds drain into back to the pond (especially if you join all the drain together) needs to be big too. Actually, if doing siphons, you are probably better off just having each grow bed drain back to the pond with it's own drain line so you don't have to worry about one siphon causing another to kick in early or another running and stopping the other one from getting a good air gulp etc.

Looks good though!!!

Is that Lieutenant Commander Data activating a transporter beam in your sketchup drawings?

Looks more like using a tricorder to take a reading

.....but probably not an AP reading.

Yeah, I thought he'd be cuter than one of the generic people in the warehouse to show scale.

So, how big should I go with the drains? I've got them drawn as 1", and that's for all of them.

I have dual 1" overflow drains on my IBC CHIFT PIST system, and they are not nearly enough to keep up with the pump. I might upgrade them to 2". In the GH I will be using 3 inch pipe. It is easier to add a reducer and make it smaller if nessesary, then to make it bigger.

Mark

For my little 20 gallon fingerling tank system, it has a pump that uses 1/2" pipe and the overflow drain to the grow bed is 1"

On my big system the pump uses 1 1/2" pipe and my gravity drains are 3". Some of the water bypasses back to the sump tank from my pump. I fear that if I sent all the water to the fish tank for too long, it would manage to overflow even with the drain plumbing being twice the dimension of the pump pipe.

Stand pipes on my grow beds are 1 1/2" but if more than one bed is sharing the drain plumbing, I go to 3" for the shared drain plumbing. Granted, I'm not really using siphons anymore, when I did most of them were using 1" flexible tubing for the loop siphons on each bed and draining into 3" tubing to move the water back to the tank.

My indoor system drains about 5gpm through 1" pipe and has been running for a couple months, so I would calculate that 1.5" would drain 11gpm, 2" drains 20, and 3" would handle 45gpm.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with the 3".

Go the biggest you can fit in. Gravity sucks at moving water.

Try telling that to a hydro power station

Are you going with an autosiphon or just a pump on a timer? If the first, you may want to oversize mildly rather than wildly as siphons are easier to start that way.

I typically go 1 or two sizes larger than calculations say I need: if you are turning over your 360 gal once an hour, that would be 1.25", so go 1.5" or 2". If you want to do it twice an hour, just go with the 2" as it can drain 1200gph (roughly), turning over your fish tank better than every 20 minutes!

Undecided option: have a 3" pipe running into your growbed and a 3" pipe coming out. Leave line out unglued and reduce it to smaller plumbing (or larger) as needed.