Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

finally made it thru the general section... tons of information there.....

i've got almost 4 pages of notes which will be applied to my new system..

got to wait until I can clean out the GH.... got alot of stuff growing now in dirt...

looking forward to start collecting parts...


one question, which is probably in the main sections.... I noticed that all the GB's are
extremely deep.... 12" + is there a reason for this? if im using a F&D system, then
i woudnt have to worry about the roots being in water.....

I was thinking about using 2 x 8's for the GB sides...

thanks
JT

While it is possible to flood and drain a shallower container than 1 foot, it does not leave you much leeway. Most people around here seem to agree that 12" or 30 cm is a good depth of grow bed for flood and drain as it allows you enough dept to leave some always dry gravel up top and and inch or so in the bottom that never quite drains and still have a good dept of gravel that gets flooded and drained. It is not just about plant roots here but also about space for bacteria for your bio-filter and enough gravel to effectively filter solids.

I do have one bed that is less than 12" deep but I don't recommend it in general. Some people have even deeper grow beds which work well for larger plants like trees or perennial crops.

I have found that about 3' wide or a little less and 1 foot deep is a good way to build lined grow beds. I say this because the liner comes in 5 1/2 foot wide rolls for the narrow stuff which works pretty well for lining growbeds of listed depth and width.

JT my beds are no more than 250mm (10") but I can see where stability
will play a part in the variety we can sow.
I agree with TCL not much depth for nutrification(sp?)
8" (200mm or 20cm) is not much depth once you take out the max flood level, somewhere below the surface of the grow media (for me ~50mm[2"]
depending on growth phase ie seeds, lings or estabished tomato for example
It's good to be able to vary the flood height
C1

Hey

I can see where that would make a difference.....


this research is taking me alittle longer then most.. I have to
keep converting liters to gallons and cm to inches .....

makes my brain tired ....

JT

Just rememeber to convert it all back before posting anything... we don't want the same headache... ....

Just kidding...

I only posted the imperial and metric so one day we could all
know what we are talking about.
Metric is so easy

Hi JT,

there is a good conversion program available on this thread. viewtopic.php?f=9&t=29

Just go down to Simmo_77 's post

(saves a lot of head aches)

Himzo.

thanks for the link...

I finally got smart and copied all the abbreviations to a notepad text file, so I dont have to
go back in the forum to find the meanings....

"who says you cant teach old dogs new tricks?"

it just takes a little longer...

jT

+1 for tcl's post. Deeper does not cause problems, but shallower does.

For converting between liters and gallons and such, I find it easiest to just use google, you can type in most anything to convert and google has a built in calculator, so put in "500 gallons to liters" and it will spit it out.

I have been trying to post the American and metric for any volumes, etc as there is such a split here. I do wish we could just change over to metric here in the US, would take a bit to get used to but it is so simple.

Actually.. it's kind of funny that you guys biffed the British Imperialists out a couple of hundred years ago...

But kept the imperial measurement system....

Hahhahah wasnt me LOL.....

jT

I think they like to call it SAE, or Standard American Engineering units...
That way they could delude themselves into thinking they created it

That is neat to know! Did it.... works great! Thanks.

there's heaps google will do for you like this I've posted the conversion a few times.
Here's post where I mentioned most of google's functionality.

http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=4511&p=160313&hilit=google+weights+measures+conversion#p160313