Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Joel,

Am i correct in that most of your growbeds are of the flood and drain design?

What sort of time base is your pump on?

I'm most probably going to go with the continuous flow system on a smaller pump.

I was going to go flood and drain with a LARGE pump (swimming pool filter pump) but was worried about the on and off cycles shortening the life of the motor and also failures taking out my fish stock.

All in all a smaller pump run cont. (cont. flow) or a large pump (flood and drain) would probably come up equal for power usage (i need to do a calc on it )

I was also going to couple a twin outle air pump which only draws 6W to the fish tank. I figure this gives me more O2 in the water and also a sort of redundancy in the sense that both the water pump and air pump would have to fail at the same time for my fish to loose oxygen. I've learnt first hand as per my last post how much O2 fish use when there are lots of them and also how quickly they can die

What do you think?

Steve

Hi Steve,

I have 4 systems of varying sizes and types.

My large Flood and drain that has a large pump and cycles off and on by using the float cut out switch attached to the pump. There is also the same size pump returning the water from a sump tank to the fish tank. In this system there is a pump on 30% of the time, timed by the pump cut out switches only.

I then have a fairly large continuous flow with an average sized pond pump, 60W. It flows continuously though I have at some stages had it on a timer to cut down the hours that the pump is running.

There is the barrel ponics system, it has an 18W pump that runs continuously but the system is flood and drain. The water continuously fills the top tank, when it's full it floods out filling the grow beds..

Then I have a very small system that is continuous flow, again with an 18 W pump.

You can have a flood and drain system with a reasonably small pump, especially if your going to back it up with a bubbler as your suggesting, in fact I'm in the process of designing a system at the moment that is going to be flood and drain with a continuously running small pump and a bubbler for the fish..

I think that flood and drain is definately the go, whether flooding through the use of a dump tank of some type, or an automated syphon on the drain line, like in Dans system, I prefer the idea of a smaller pump running continuously..

There are just so many options.......

Joel