Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Very very new to this, but I love the idea. I have read a good bit here but so far I have not found any indication of how often you should flood your grow beds. I have a small drum system setup, only water atm, and it floods my grow beds about every 10 minutes, wasnt planned, just the way it worked out.

Thanks

When using siphons you don't have as much control, with timers since the inexpensive ones allow 15 minutes intervals a common setup is 15 minutes on 45 minutes off.

My system uses loop siphons and they flood in like 7 minutes and drain in like 3 or so. But those are just biofilters. I have other parts on timers for the plants those are 15 minutes on 45 off at the hottest part of the day, like two hours in between cycles during the morning and evening, and only on a couple of times during the night.

I go with dave

Well right now it I have a pond pump circulating with a small flow going into a flood drum. I have installed a bell siphon to drain the flood drum into my grow beds which inturn drains back into the tank. I just changed a few things around but right now it floods about every 10-15 minutes and drains out in 2-3 minutes.
So Dave, your floods about every 2 hours during the day and only say twice overnight? Would it be too much for the plants if I can get it spaced out to once an hour. I am setup with 3/4" pvc pipe and valve, getting small flow is a bit tougher. I do have left over ploly 1/4 " I believe, think I should switch to that to get a smaller flow?

Thanks again

I think 1/4" polypipe would block pretty fast.
The small bed on my aquarium cycles in less than 2 minutes with the autosyphon. It works out pretty well as the 140L tank volume goes through the bed once an hour and has been running for over a year without any issues.
When i switched to using a timer 15on/45 off the water quality wasn`t quite as good (cloudy instead of clear) as it took at least 4 hours to turnover the tank volume.
I guess there are a few variables to consider, size of the bed, tank volume and pump capacity.

Newbie welcome, I have bell siphons setup on a couple of GBs - they flood ~5 mins and drain in ~1 min (small GBs 100l/25 gal) - the plants have no problem with that

I do it so that I have the turnover of water through the gravel - on my other system the GBs flood in 10 mins, drain in 3 mins and don't get another flood cycle for an hour ( this system floods GBs in consecutive order - 6 GBs @ 10 min floods = 1 hour complete cycle )