Hi and welcome to the forum
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Hmm, good question PhxLiz. Yeah, I'm way behind, no pics at this time, I have a bunch of files with no content on my camera's SD card Food&Fish so I'll just describe what I've found and post some pics once the season gets going
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The twist elbow water level adjuster works well and doesn't need to be changed much once you figure out where you want the level. My climate is very different from your's PhxLiz. Any salt build up is flushed out during the winter rains we get here. I just leave the beds uncovered and let them drain freely. In your climate I would expect salt buildup to be a bit more of a problem - the adjuster should help but you'll need to flush from the top on occasion and mixing the soil up every few years might help too. Some of the members that have a climate similar to yours' might provide some insight since I'm sure they will have to deal with this if they haven't already.
If you're building some wicking beds I think these have done pretty well but there are definitely some things that could be better and the newer designs are better than these. If you look at the recent beds made by Food&Fish or the beds DecalsbyJT made in his thread those would probably be easier to build and work better. In my opinion, wicking beds aren't really any cheaper than AP beds but work differently and I like having the combination because the wicking beds warm up faster here. Another thing to like is that as long as you keep the top of the wicking bed dry, weeds aren't really a problem (being a raised bed it's easier to deal with them anyway).
I would use pressure treated lumber instead of cedar around the beds mostly because it holds screws better. Some of the hoops have pulled out in bad weather, mostly near the end of the beds. I used cedar because I wasn't too keen on the pressure treated being around my vegetables so you may want to consider this. If you want to use something other than pressure treated, using epoxy in the holes helps to repair the pull outs (this is done in boat building).
I lost one of the beds to a tear in the plastic liner near the spigot. It was the first bed I built and I placed the hole for the spigot too near a rebar support post - I think the hole was probably caused partly by my messing around with this and partly by operating the water level elbow. You don't want the drain pipe portion on the inside of the bed to rotate against the plastic liner (which may have happened). A better liner would probably have been fine but I'm going to have to dig out a lot of soil and rocks to fix this (so far I've procrastinated pretty well on this
). Even with the problem the bed does pretty well but dries out too fast. The identical bed next to it does much better.
I think in your climate (hot and dry) you'll need a deeper bed with a larger reservoir. My watering during the heat of summer is about once every 3 or 4 days on the functional beds and about every day or 2 on the non-functional bed. The smaller beds that are wider for their length seem to last longer between fills than the long narrow beds. Food&Fish and DecalsbyJT have more volume in their reservoir for water storage and aren't using rocks, this is one of the main things I like about how they do these. Looking down the road to when I finally tear these down, the rocks may be a problem.
I've cobbled together a tomato clip and roller hook system on one of the beds to support tall plants and I'll probably do something similar on the others since it works well enough and I'll be able to rotate the crops more easily if the supports are already in place. This is what the roller hook system looks like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNqhwtfCtFACheers
Backyard Aquaponics
