Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Just keep the gravel damp Jens - its good to see someone reading the info already here and doing it, rather than asking 6 million questions.

Thanks guys for your responses, I guess it's just a simple matter of how many peeps and what method to move it.

Are you kidding? there's a well of knowledge in here! How can there not be an answer already here? For me it's a matter of seeing things in action so all I need is a set of instructions and I just make a mini version of it to make sure it works.... Doesn't always work but most of the time.

Just a treat I'll post another picture, this time the cubbyhouse that I took a picture of about a month ago... It has a 250litre black Fish tank inside, 4 clear containers full of clear gravel, also with a 850litre per hour pump. My God aren't these things expensive! I put the piping mid-September and the water only went straight to the first one and trickled into the second one. it wouldn't go into the third or fourth, so the first GB container ended up getting flooded and overflowed all over the place. I got mad and kinda lost my motivation to keep going. and my mind was on other things as well.
Early October saw me thinking about it again and wanting to have salads coming straight out of the garden so I thought about ways of spreading the water out. I talked to some experts at WaterGardenWorld and they recommended on having a sump tank up at the top and told me that if the pump pumped a tiny bit more water than the switches in each of the pipes leading to the Growbed tanks would be more even because all the pipes would be sucking the water. So I bought tank fittings and some poly fittings to make 25mm thread into 13mm and attach to in-line switches. So I could attach the poly pipes in the bottom of the sump tank without the use of sealants. I tested a mini version of this so I know it works as long as the sump tank is perfectly straight.
This weekend I'm going to be making a single hole and putting the parts together with one Growbed to see if the water will flow properly and if it does I'll go back to WaterGardenWorld for 3 more sets of the same fittings for the other GB containers.
If you have any suggestions or links in this forum about evenly spreading out the water to all the tanks with the equal amounts of the properties taken from the FT, I would appreciate it. I see a lot of people's systems fill one tank and the water flows from that first tank to the next to the next and finally back into the fishtank. I might do that another time but for now I want all tanks to be even.
well that's it for this morning

That's not a cubbyhouse... that's a purpose built aquaponics system enclosure....

Who was the idiot that thought it was a cubbyhouse....

oww, my dad made that treehouse and it was a design made by mum... it had a ladder a full floor and a slide.
but they've long since been rusted and had to be removed several years ago before a big party as it was not safe for kids to play on.
that "cubbyhouse" is 23 years old. My parents did not expect it to last that long.
I dont know that now I have an aquaponics system installed in there, how much longer it can last. but heck I'm gonna keep using it right to the end! It was my play area and it will stay that way!

erm some updates, i've been fiddling with autosiphons and bell standpipes and whatnot because I dont like how the bell autosiphon takes up a bit of room in the containers.

I thought about how you guys have an insubmersible and inline pumps, how you have loop siphons and standpipes that go inside the containers. so I thought, why not a bell autosiphon OUTSIDE the container, the water would just come out of the hole at the bottom side and still fill up the same way. It was just a matter of getting all the plumbing and the fittings. the only gluing I had to do was attach the inside pipe to the smallest reducing joiner that would be the last fitting the water would pass through on the way to the FishTank.

The yukky part of the whole thing is that I have to carefully cut bits of the pipe to the right height as to the level that I want the water to stop filling the GrowBed. I'm going to have to reglue one of the standpipes because it's too short coz I cut it too fast; gotta cut it slowly till its right.

Anyway, also posted an update on the tommies, still growing! and still green I'm waiting for it to go red

Was it fun trying to get all the fittings? Bunnings out here seems to hold all the fittings you needs - except that one crucial one

totally fun... there were 2 parts that I wanted... it seems that the micro irrigation stuff and the black poly irrigation would have no relationship with each other! irritating! I kept trying to fit 6 or 5mm into 13 up to 19mm pipes.. nobody seems to have them... but I found this place in ozzie park that sold hydroponic equipment and they had the parts I wanted but the parts were like over 5 years old so they're not ordering any more unless i want a whole lot of those parts. I told the salesguy that if my external bell siphon gets popular I might just do that.
Have been meaning to buy the parts on the internet but heck, its kinda hard to visualize what you want... I'm more of fiddle and fit this and that, I like to play with the fittings till it works.
They are meant to be small so that the siphoning action is sloooooow. Coz i have my pump running once every 2 hours I wanted the water to get around slowly - at least half an hour, and then an hour and a half of drying out.
That's the system with my Tomato AP as well, and they're doing good. I have thought that long cycles would cause the nitrifying process to slow down, but it doesn't really make that much difference.

so from a 30L container using 6mm clear vinyl pipe inside a 13mm poly pipe as a bell autosiphon, it takes about 10 minutes for it to totally drain.

Any sort of pumping regime seems to work well, as long as there is a dry time, and a wet time. I have gone anywhere between constantly flooded, and 12 hours dry, and the results seem to be pretty similar.

Hi Misti:
This is more of a standpipe than a siphon, yes?

I also think it's fun to have them "outboard". I've removed knuckle skin trying to remove standpipes before. The only downside is to make sure that the bed hole doesn't get clogged or blocked with gravel. One of my beds did that and overflowed. It can also help to make some drainage area at the bottom of the bed, like with drainage pipe or larger gravel.

viewtopic.php?p=107205#p107205

thank you OBO and DD for the responses,

OBO - yes that would appear to be the case.

DD - I'm still a little fuzzy about the difference between the standpipe and a bell autosiphon. Been trying to read up on it in the forum but there's no clear clarification anyway on the forum about that so I've kinda come to my own conclusions LOL. bell autosiphon is the action of water drawing more water through the pipes by filling up the bell pipe and then overflowing into the inner pipe and only stops when theres no more water... my understanding of the standpipe was sort of the same thing but with lots of little parts to it. Like the small pipe for the air to kick in, or the crenelations.

BTW thanks for the warning about blockages... I think i'll put a kind of a pipe filter at the bottom that also covers the hole so nothing other than water goes in... not even roots.

A standpipe is what you can use on a bed running from a timer. Bed floods, and overflows the standpipe until the pump turns off. Beds slowly darins from a small bleed hole at the bottom of the standpipe.

A siphon can be run from a bed with constant water supply, still has the inner standpipe, water fills bed, overflows standpipe, initiates siphon, drains bed. Siphon stops, rinse and repeat

1 extra mechanical part (the timer) is deleted, so siphon systems are generally more reliable once running properly.

I think yours is a siphon jen. Overflows down the small inner tube, and fully drains the bed before repeating?

Yeh i use autosiphons to drain the growbeds.... the pump is in the fishtank pumping dirty water to a another container that is higher above the growbeds. I sort of call it the sump tank coz it's just an extra tank for the better distribution of water. The water just simply drain from this container to the Growbeds. Each pipe that goes to each bed has an inline valve so I can control the flow... so that I can restrict it to flow only as much as it is flowing out.
I would like an overflow pipe to each GB, but I think that'd be overdoing it. Really the whole system is in constant change. I'm always thinking up of new or better ways and I'm fiddling this and that and trying to make it flow better.
The next change I don't think is going to happen till halfway December due to a lot of things happening leading up to Christmas. But I've already got a few ideas to change and that top container is gonna be removed because I don't think it's necessary, and I need that air space for the plants to grow in. But ATM still thinking about it.

OK, I think I see it now.

So the little white hose is inside the vertical black hose. I thought that was the drain hose shown in the bed picture. Boy that looks narrow, might clog pretty easily with biofilm or other crud.

PIFT DFHT System

DD the reason why i use siphons from the growbeds is because they should have sufficiently removed about 50% of the dirt from the water and the water will flow through it too much for any build up to occur.

I'm using a bell siphon that size in my tommyAP system and have had it running since beginning of July. it's been 5 months and the only problems I've ever had with that system was the caterpillars. I guess its still young but 5 months is a lot of time to build up.



haha
Pump In Fish Tank ????