Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Theses photos are over the last 3 weeks......looks like we are seeing some changes...

Timed flood & drain... way out in front... overall...

And the "siphoned" system looks to be almost on par with the constantly flooded system now... better with some stuff, not quite with other...

some more comparisons from today....note that the weather has been very hot these last few days....

The "leafy" veges certainly seem to have benefitted with extra water availabilty during the "hot" spell....

Now you are talking

Wow, what a wonderful experiment - thanks so much for doing this!!!

I was about to setup an auto-siphon bed just for peppers, but I'll probably just switch to a timer setup after seeing these results.

out if interest, inthe photos abpove how do we know which is which?

The photos are always 1,2,3 left to right... I'll get some more today and post them up..

Planted some brassicas a week or two ago and the ones in the constant flood beds are powering on and those in the autosipon beds are doing nothing.

Having the water Drop in from all around the edge in the CF bed would have to be a must?? to stop dead spots??

what size holes do they have joel?? and what kind of frequency??

and how does it go with blockage due to solids??

No idea, sounds like another experiment for a different day.. We have 6mm holes in all pipework, they are about 150mm apart around the irrigation pipe.

Any blockage problems is usually due to plant roots growing up the holes and in the pipe rather than from solids with the water. But every 6 months to a year we generally undo the pipework on the bed and check it..

Here are the latest results.



System 3 still outperforming the others, but the siphon system (1) has started to get it's act together. Also system 3 seems to have a few issues with the rainbow chard not doing so well..

The fennel in the constantly flooded system is really suffering, almost dead. It's interesting to see the different plants reactions to the different styles of system.

I'm uploading a video with some more closeups, will post that in here when it's done, youtube says 254 minutes to go.

I noticed the FD system was leaps and bounds ahead yesterday when i was up there
now switched my system from CF to FD again

Yes I thought that was you FB... Are those scales working ok for you? Faye had troubles with the battery connection in hers, needed some fiddling with the battery, I tested all the others and they seemed fine...

Yeah, interesting to look at the systems up close in person and compare the different plant growths, we'll be starting to harvest out of them very soon.

yeh the scales are great, weighed some of the bigger barra, at 500ish average, 600 largest they were about 200-300 when i got them