Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Aww, come on, you could have saved those safety glasses from damage!

No problem. This thread reads a lot like how my brain works. I feel right at home.

I used a 4 inch grinder and went lenth ways. Next time a radial saw across.

Loop siphons look so simple and bullet-proof, but everybody seems to go with bell siphons / affnans for flood and drain beds, so they must not be as effective as all that. Can anyone explain this to me?

Also, while you're at it, can you also explain why an affnan is not a bell siphon? My newbie brain is not seeing the difference.

Bullwinkle explained to me how sump water is just as good as tank water for plants...for some reason I was forgetting about the whole concept of diffusion, and thinking somehow that the plants and media in the giant bio-filter of growbed happiness would be sucking *everything* out of the water, not just the dirty bits. Duh.

(This came about because I was envisioning a long narrow high-up growbed for growing upside-down tomatoes, rather than chasing right-side-up ones up the sides of my greenhouse, and trying to figure out how to water it without putting a second pump not-in-the-sump in the PIST half of my someday CHIFT-PIST system to send them nice dirty fish tank water.)

But then, while thrilling me by solving the only problem I had thought of in the idea, he added a whole new one when he pointed out that tomato roots like to clog up things like long, narrow growbeds. So now I'm envisioning a long-narrow high-up growbed fed by a pipe along its entire length, lying on top of the media, with small holes drilled down its length partway up the side, to let the water run all the way down its length and supply a constant trickle of sump water (diverted from the sump-to-tank flow of the pump) to trickle down vertically through the eventual masses of tomato roots. The thinking is that all the tomatoes would still get their share of water and nutrients, and instead of having to travel the length of the clogged-up growbed, the water would only have to drip down via gravity from the top of it to the bottom of it, and then drip out the bottom into the regular growbeds below, so the masses of roots wouldn't be such an issue. At least until it came time to clean them out of the growbeds to make room for new ones.

Assuming I could actually find a way to fashion and secure such a growbed without subjecting myself to greenhouse collapse and potential traumatic brain injury, would this A) work from a flow/circulation perspective, B) keep the tomatoes happy/health/productive?

Also, while doing the 75-minute commute to my temp job this morning (it's only 14 miles as the crow flies, but crows can fly over rivers, whereas I have to find a bridge...speaking of which, dang it, it's 2012; I was supposed to have a hover car by now!)

Where was I? (Aren't you glad you don't live inside my head?) Oh, yeah. While driving, I was thinking about grow bed media, and seeing whether I could think of stuff besides gravel / rocks / expensive extruded stuff that might also work. Most of the things I thought of were obvious failures due to tendencies to float, become water-logged, or eventually dissolve (I blame the earliness of the hour and my low caffeine titre), but my visual image of a Lego-filled grow bed was simply awesome. Okay, so it would probably cost more than the extruded stuff, but wouldn't a Lego-filled grow bed be AWESOME?

NOTE: The longer and more mentally exhausting my work day, the more babbly and tangential I become. I had a very long and mentally exhausting work day today.

If I were stinking rich, I would buy these in every color and fill them with Lego to make grow beds.

The Affnan siphon is a bell siphon, but it's basic difference is that it has a funnel on top. As I understand it, this makes it start with more ease. easy starting means easy stopping, because you can make it start with less flow. The stopping part likes less flow, the starting part like more flow. I dont use them, but he has some stuff on why he thinks they work on his web site. I think they are pretty much universally accepted and peer reviewed into the "they work" category.

I didn't have as much luck with loop siphons, but I suspect it was because my loops were too big. if they are too big, the arc iat the top is very long, and it allows water to just flow rather than fill the pipe and cause a siphon. This means it never really starts but just flows out at the same rate as the pump is putting water in. Bell siphons also do that if the flow isnt enough for the diameter of the standpipe.

I think for most people it comes down to which worked first for them.

Someone on here had a thread with a lego system I think. A small aquarium system from memory. But I cant remember if they used it as media, or as construction material.

I'v found some guys at my local recycling depot that will same plastic soft drink bottle tops for me in bulk, so some time this summer I might get organised enough to try it. They float I think, But I'll sort that out. I was thinking of running them through my garden mulcher to improver their design a bit and add some surface area.

There are some plastic stock troughs in the world somewhere that might be inexpensive enough to use as grow beds, but keep in mind that whatever you use is pretty much for ever, and a $200 dollar grow bed only has to make $200 worth of organic veggies to have made it worthwhile. .

If you do a trickle through bed up high for tomatoes keep in mind that media in a trickle through bed doesn't always provide as much bio-filter as a flood and drain or constant flood bed will. Also a bed up high for plants to hang down will limit the useful space below as well as blocking more light. And the pumps need to be stronger to pump up higher and you need more support structure to support beds up higher. so weigh your options before you set your heart on upside down tomatoes. It isn't that hard to train tomatoes up instead of letting them hang down.

...Is this weekend. They always do it on weekends when I'm working. But it started today, actually, even though Saturday and Sunday are always the big days. So I managed to stay on top of my dictations all day, and didn't have any clients with crises to throw me off schedule, and actually got off work in time to meet my husband at the expo center so we could run through fast and see what's there before they closed.

There wasn't any aquaponics stuff.

My husband found this, though:

It's crooked because I was trying to get the whole thing in without making it too small to see the goldfish. I think they were trying to show how their gutter system keeps your gutters so clean that goldfish can live in them, whereas regular gutters look like the ones up above. I'm not sure goldfish wouldn't have liked the one up above just as well, but maybe I've just known slovenly goldfish.

I might just buy their gutter thingies if I could really have actual goldfish in my gutters.

That's the message I got from that...

Goldfish want to live in your gutters. (But only ground floor gutters)

No good for my gold fish they were feral