Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I went with 19mm building stone and sieved it 10mm. Most of the bits are therefore pretty chunky.

I found that bouncing the sieve around a bit did a fair job of dusting the gravel so I didn't bother washing. While testing the optimum flowrate by running a garden hose through the tower while it was standing in a bucket, the water started running clear really quick.

Might be the answer to a lazy man's dream. Idea of washing a cubic metre of stone freaks me a bit :-)

Will hopefully plumb it all tomorrow and get fish in on sat and 9 more toweres in by end sunday. Pics to follow on completion.

Sweet, looking forward to them.

I think that if you use large diameter substrate such as expanded clay balls or large gravel, perhaps it would clog less.

I found that corriander and parsley grew fairly well.

I took mine down due to clogging. I was using a fairly small diameter pea gravel.

Johnnie, A colleague who is also setting up a system priced clay balls here and they are loony expensive so I'll have to let that go. He also tested the standard 19mm stone, they call it 'road aggregate' in the building trade here, for it's displacement. It takes up less than 50% of the volume so the gaps must be big. Hopefully drainage should be good.

Coriander, parsley and basil are what I intend starting with so I'm glad you had good results with some of them.

Will be doing the water changeouts with water from ponds on the property so hopefully cycling will be speeded up.