Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

hi all, just thought i'd see if any of you guys had ever seen a product on the market designed to irrigate trays of tube stock via flood and drain. Our current method of over head sprinklers is extremely wasteful. I'd imagine we'd use signifiacanly less water if it was done via flood and drain where used water could be treated via a reed bed filter and then re-circulated. sorry, no fish in the equation but may be of some interest to y'all anyway. If there is already a product out there then there is no use re-inventing the wheel.

Should be pretty easy to do mate.

If you don't want to just set up a timed flood and drain for it, then consider buying a single autopotdevice and installing it into a tray where you can put the tubes.

have a look at SteveS's system, he has something set up for starting his seedlings off

i should probably go into more detail. This is a commercial size nursery with over 100m of 90cm wide benches used to store natives prior to being planted out in bush re-gen projects

i'll post some pics of the trays and tube stock as soon as the batteries charge up

right, just like my work ones

tube stock

yep, it's a good question and one we should be thinking about at work too

You could try using flood & drain hydro trays... like these ....

1500mmx300mmx80mm

2000mmx1000mmx118mm

2304mmx1115mmx118mm

And flood and drain them with these F&D sets...

Either with, or without a timer... depending on the tube stock...

Or driven by an autopot solenoid as VB said....

thats what im talkn about, got any supplier link s for me?

Im not really familiar with the auto pot devices but this is certainly heading in the right direction.

One concern is the possibility of potting mix contaminating the system afew coarse filters periodically cleaned out should do the trick

wonder if this would work
http://www.autopot.com.au/default.aspx? ... 8573d8e9df

If you are gonna be draining the water through a reed bed or perhaps even just a gravel bed of some sort, you probably don't need to worry too much about he potting mix gunking up the tanks. About all you need for the flood and drain is some way to make the benches into huge trays. Could be done with the hydro trays or you could probably do it with some heavy duty pond liner that you could get in big rolls and just frame a lip around the edge of the benches to give you the depth for flood and drain. Then you just need a timer that will send water into the benches for as long as it takes to flood them. Then you can either allow them to drain slowly thought a small drain (need to keep an eye on this to make sure it doesn't get clogged.) Or you can set up the benches with some form of auto siphon to drain them quickly once they flood to a certain depth.

With potting mix, you will likely not need to flood the benches often depending on the weather. Probably between once every other day and say 4 times a day.

Good luck with it!

Thanks TCLynx, we are considering all options and even got prices for sheet metal trays. What ever we go with it needs to be affordable and last. We intend on visiting a nursery that has one of these systems in actions but realistically this won't be until next year. Will post pics of it so stay tuned. cheers.