Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

We all face a challenge moving water around the grow beds, yet keeping enough water in the fish tank so the fish don't have to swim sideways. Some of us alternate filling the beds, some have sumps, and so on.

So I've been contemplating automation, but I'm not electrically inclined. I keep envisioning running stuff using the movement of the water. Then I started thinking about water wheels, and from there started pondering oscillating lawn sprinklers. They use a small internal water wheel to make the sprinkler bar slowly move back and forth. Now this starts getting a bit like a Rube Goldberg Machine, but what if you used the mechanism in an oscillating sprinkler to slowly distribute the output from a continuous pump among several pipes leading to your grow beds? Wouldn't that be fun? Then you could dump the water from the grow beds using the ever-popular auto-siphon.

Who's up for it? Go take your sprinkler apart and see what you can do! It's too cold here for me to stand in the yard with a hacked-apart sprinkler, but I bet there's someone out there who's up for a challenge!!

Janet-
I would be careful about trying to do it based on timing. If you could initiate a switchover by the autosiphon kicking in, then you would be closer to guaranteeing that you don't have much water left in the beds to drown your roots.
If you use time, unless you can time it rather precisely, you will probably have a situation where either you don't fill the beds, thus not starting the autosiphon, or start refilling your beds after the autosiphon has stopped. (Unless you know that your beds fill in 15 minutes and take 6 minutes to drain, then you can set it up to cycle for 18 minutes, but if it ever gets out of sync, you're going to have plants with wet feet.)

Hi Greenedo,
Actually, my current system runs with timers and auto-siphons. It begins filling, then then autosiphon kicks in, then the filling stops 15 minutes after it started, then the autosiphon stops when the water level is too low. It's rather nice. Since it fills slower than it drains, water level starts slowly dropping as soon as the autosiphon comes on. Then it drops faster when the pump shuts off.

Ah Janet, you after more chrissie presents :sunny:

I'm still in HSM, trying to get a bigger tank and GB setup for the SP, will then get back to anti-parallelising ( feeding GBs in series) using the power door lock actuators - been fiddling with it in during leisure time and trying to remove the complications

Les, you are too funny. Work the sprinkler oscillator gears in there, and then you'll really have something.

I have seen the gearing thing working, applying water to different areas as the worm travels in a cylinder via water pressure - more fun having doors lock/unlock, flaps raising & lowering and thinking "better put in an overflow pipe in case the door doesn't open"

For the Rube Goldberg effect:
1- Have your inlet go to a see-saw pipe arrangement, where it can be tilted toward GB A or GB B.
2- Have the exhaust for the autosiphon dump into a bucket that is connected via pulleys to the inlet pipe so that when GB A starts to autosiphon, it will pull up on the inlet pipe, effectively diverting the input flow into GB B. The bucket (similar to your aereator) would have holes in it to allow the water to flow back into the lower tank.

Your inflow could be done with a piece of flexible tubing mounted vertically, about 2-4 inches (5-10cm) above the GBs. Add a simple pully to your current aereator / outlet to the autosiphon, and presto!

Trying to keep it simple, so there's less to break and/or clog.

LOL!!

and then you want to add a 3rd GB - out with the binary code book again

Understand where you're coming from Greenado and have the auto siphon working quite well on my system, just looking for the holy grail in serial GB feed

Doing 3 becomes more problematic... It's not bad to do 2, but doing three, would be far more Rubean than 2. I think 2 would actually work, I can't guarantee more....

I was actually thinking of a merry-go-round arrangement. Then each growbed would fill during a certain number of degrees in the circle.

For you, Les...

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/flash/honda-ad.html

And for you, Greenedo...
I hit the button too fast!

Yeh, it’s a good ad – I reckon its flawed right at the end when the front wheels roll off the balanced ramp but the rear wheels are behind the fulcrum, the ramps should then slam back up and smash into the underbelly of the car (and there’s no fire)