Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have recently developed the prototype for the heated systems in my greenhouse.

The tank is 200L blue barrel, with a half blue barrel sump, and three half barrel grow beds. Each of the GB's are slow drain and have a car door actuator valve to control fill.

The sequencing is controlled by a pic micro. The sequencer closes all beds on power on, then opens the first bed to fill, after the fill time it shuts the bed off and waits for the drain time after which it opens bed 2 and repeats the process same for bed 3 then back to bed 1.
The time is adjustable fill from 8 - 15m and the drain time is from 12 - 19m.

I developed 2 valves for testing (mark 1 -3 did not even make it to testing!) mark 4 and 5 are shown below, one is a T joiner and the other an 85deg bend.
Both work the same way. The actuator opens and closes a plug, water flow is good when open and near zero on closed. A small amount does leak on some occasions but not enough to prevent the open bed from filling and any leak just runs back to the sump via the drain.

Some close ups of the internals and guides and adjustments available. I found I needed to make a guide to help run the plunger/plug straight. The plug is a 25mm caravan plug, and all piping is DWV 40mm. The bend valve is adjusted in hight by swing in the support arms.

closeup on the guide for the bend valve

When all beds are closed the system overflows to return water to the sump. I designed the overflow by adjusting the angle from a T piece.

The photos below show the return from the drain and the overflow the sump is buried and insulated by scoria to reduce heat loss.

well all I can say is your alot smarter than me!

Thats awesome mate thanks for sharing!

cool stuff.

great job Novaris
real good thinkin'

I've just ordered myself a car door actuator to tinker with.
I still have not been able to find the flap valves you used in your other system, (guess they just don't have them over here.) I finally ordered a 3" backwater valve and hopefully I can figure out some way to make it work.

So what are the plugs you are using on those test valves? What are they normally used for? Perhaps something like this will work even better for my purposes.

Looking forward to your progress and results of your extended testing on these new valves.
Thanks

The plugs are used in small sinks installed in "caravans" TCL ... aka... or similar to "trailer homes"... just a small rubber sink plug...

I like it! I wish I could find some actuators that were cheep!

I've just ordered an actuator for about $10
http://www.commandocaralarms.com/itemdetails.asp?ProductID=552
I just have to figure out how to wire it once I get it. Then perhaps I need to make a repeat cycle timer since I'm only thinking on using one.

novaris,
How are those actuators doing on your system? And how are you running them so as not to heat them up too much and burn them out? I lately while tinkering with mine, let it get too hot and it no work no more.