Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello,

I'm planning on using half cut blue barrels as grow beds, so they will have around 90L of media in each bed. Just wondering what sort of volume of water I'd need to flood such a bed. Is it typically around 15% of the total bed volume? Just need to figure out the size of the overflow resevior tank I need to use to feed the GBs.

Thanks ^_^

Antisense

The media typically takes about 40-50% of the volume of the growbed... of course, you wont be flooding the growbed to the absolute top of the barrel... in fact only to about 25mm below the media surface...

So as a rough guess... < 50L/half barrel....

Thanks for that info

I've usually operated under the rule that the media actually fills 50-60% of the space in a grow bed and so it requires like 40-50% of the volume to flood the bed. (That is a pretty loose number and figuring if it were a 100 liter container that is filled to near the top with media and only flooded to 25mm below the surface of the media then it might take 40 liters of water to flood.)

I always like to figure extra "sump" capacity so having at least 50% of the grow bed volume available for flooding is important to me even if I never actually put that much water in the bed at one instant. I actually like to add 10% to the "sump" volume so that I can install a float top up valve below the normal low water mark but above the pump run dry level to keep things happy in the long run.

However, with the new spider valve, might not need to have such huge sumps anymore!!!!! YAY

... yeah, put in a fudge factor of about 10% for safety...