Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The narrow side of the house faces North and gets all day sun. In fact, if you're going to grow veggies at my place, especially in winter, it's far and away the best spot for it. Once I build a lean-to greenhouse around it I should be able to grow tomatoes and other summer veggies here all year round.



The system is not quite finished yet, there's 5 half-barrels plumbed in as a single flood/drain 'bed' with an external bell siphon, with another row of 5 more half-barrels yet to go in.



The FT is an IBC with the top quarter set up as a raft system. This has its own pump so it's a separate water circuit from the 1/2 barrels. The pump is in the sump, it pumps up to the raft tank, which overflows down into the FT, which in turn overflows into the sump.

The raft part of the system has been running for about a week now and has a few things growing in it.


I'm experimenting with propagating my tomatoes from the side shoots that I pruned from the balcony system...


The rest of the cups have assorted greens in them growing from seed...


They're a long way down into the cup because the styrofoam is so thick and the cup protrudes a long way above the styro. I clobbered this together from what materials I had at hand... over time I'll improve and refine the system.


Everything seems to be growing quite well, roots are already going down into the water.


The plumbing for the 1/2 barrels...




What you don't see in these pics is all the additional room I have down the side of the house. I'm planning to later add a wall of towers, about 30 or so, at 1.5 meters high each.

Cheers,
Gab.

I am a little confused as to why the standpipes in what I assume are going to be your growbeds are riddled with holes....

If you run constant flood then they should have no holes and if you run flood and drain just one small hole at the bottom for the drain period...

Im guessing they arent stand pipes Brian, they must be media guards?

They're not standpipes but drains. The 1/2 barrels will be flood/drain with the bell siphon external to the barrels, in that 100.. pipe nestled between two blue 1/2 barrels.

If you look at the pic of the plumbing underneath the barrels you'll see that they're all plumbed together with 40mm pipe that comes in to a 100mm tee. That tee is part of what houses the siphon, you can see the 25mm standpipe exiting the bottom of the tee. So the five 1/2 barrels are joined up and flood/drain together as a single grow bed.

The 40mm drain pipes you see inside the barrels are just to permit them to drain, the idea behind that drainpipe design is that I can visually inspect if roots start impeding the drainpipe.

What we mean is the problem you will have with this is that the water escaping through the holes in the standpipes will be quite significant therefor you would have to be pumping a large volume to fill them up. Not even sure if a syphoning effect would happen even then.

Charlie, I think he's saying all the beds are connected and share a single siphon so none of them drain until that siphon kicks in. The siphons in between the two half barrels and really is just a trigger for all these drains. I betting it will work if he's designed the siphon portion correctly but it really should be tested before filling with rocks (better safe than sorry)

Yeah, sounds like the "holy pipes" are only to connect the barrels to the pipe that contains the siphon. I would think this connection should be as free flowing as possible (hence the holes). Cool setup!

interesting notion.

There used to be a really good video on a multi-bed siphon. It might have been one of Affnan's designs but I couldn't find the darn thing. He had the siphon over the fish tank. The only downside is not being able to regulate the water level separately for each bed but you could fix this with an overflo and additional drain.

Ok yea, I got it now. my bad.

One suggestion is to put a media guard around your drain pipes so any roots can be just twisted off before they start blocking your drains.

Cool setup.

Welcome to another "narrow side of the house" APer. Perhaps we need our own members page?

Media guard would probably be good. You might wind up having to take apart the pipes under the growbed if the roots make it down there. The media guard would give you some advance warning, make it easier to trim the roots and would keep the media out if you need to pull your drains for some reason. Not a huge deal but worth considering.

This is right... my apologies if my explanation wasn't too clear. It's working reliably without media at the moment, at least it was before the impeller shaft on the pump broke. It's a very cheap pump that's seen a lot of use in several aquariums over the years, and I wanted a larger capacity pump anyhow so no great loss.
....

Media guard?... I'm not sure what that's referring to. Is it the larger diameter pipe with lots of holes usually found around the bell siphon in a typical bed setup? ...that is, the one that holds the media away from the bell in an 'in-bed' bell siphon?

If it is then I thought about that, but I'm trying to avoid expending too much gravel area/volume to these drains. The theory behind this setup is that I can visually inspect down the drain pipes for root intrusion and if need be I can run a slightly larger diameter pipe down over these fixed drain pipes, between the drain pipe and the gravel, to act as a guillotine and cut off any roots that grow into the drain pipe.... That's the idea anyhow, no telling if it'll actually work, it's all a big trial & error learning curve this season.

Sounds like it will work if the fit between the pipes is close. It will be hard to push the larger pipe over the drain with media already in the bed. You could bevel the lower end to make it work better.