Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

ready to start plumbing just dug a hole and inserted icb for sump.sump is outside glass house.my 4 bath tubs..3 have 40 mil drains the other has 50 mil drain..now as to draining the bath tubs, Do i use some thing like a stand pipe thingy and have all these draining to sump.. any advise, photos would be most gratefully recieved...Now have an air bubbler to keep my visciouse hunting red fin happy for the moment
cheers mizzie
ps photos to follow

So ya dug hole son.... well done.....

I'll let the bathtub brigade explain the intricacies of plumbing them.... perhaps see "Worms" thread or TT's....

Draining back to a sump seems to have become the preferred method....

I am a member of the "bathtub brigade" - standpipe works well for me. Most difficult part of plumbing my bathtubs was working out how to connect bathtubs to PVC pipe - easy once you know how.



Mizzie, are you aware that the sump can "pop" up out of the ground if rainwater drains into your nicely dug hole?

See Skygazers system thread for an example.

Careful of the ibc in the ground leave it in the cage and put tin around it to stop the dirt pushing the liner in [ its happened to a few members]

There are a few questions you can answer to help decide exactly what kind of drain you want.

Do you want to use a timer on the pump or do you want the pump to run all the time?

With a timer on the pump, you can fill the tubs quickly and then when the pump turns off, they will slowly drain to the sump. For this sort of standpipe, and drain, you want the tub to drain slowly enough that it will still fill during the pumping cycle. It also wants to drain fast enough that it has just finished draining before the next time the pump turns on again.

If you are going to run the pump all the time, then you will need to plumb auto siphons for the drains so that the tubs will automatically drain quickly once the are full. There are several types of auto siphons. The most popular seem to be loop or bell siphons. There are plenty of threads all about siphons.

As to physically hooking the pipes up to the bath tubs, there are a few people out there who have done that and perhaps they will link those parts of their threads here for you.

Yep happenned to me big time.

Just finished securing mine down last weekend. Now this may not be a problem for you but my water table is high in my backyard so it was a BIG problem when my sump rose ! Anyway I attached some brackets to the side of my wheelie bin sump then concreted it all in the hole with 10 bags of ready mix !

For my plumbing I use standpipes with timers. My biggest problem was finding a bath tub drain and a suitable reduced to make the standpipe. I ended up using a caroma 40mm drain and the reducer was a 32mm to 25mm pressure pipe reducer from iplex (there seems to be large number of variations to these reducer / drain so check before you leave the store that the reducer fits into the plug hole -without grate- snugly).