Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Something learned from car racing in Australia when they were trying to equalise the teams - if you have a drain, and you swirl the liquid around the container, you get the liquid out much faster than trying to drain it any other way other than pumping pressure behind it.

Print barrels for drainage with swirl patterns on the inside which speed the transfer of liquids.

(the whirlpool effects pass air up the middle as the liquid drains)

Ask your mate if he can just print me a 3D printer. That's what I really want.

Hmmm...

Thinking....

Can we print BW some new neural paths? *innocent look*

Correcto!

In that case, if you know what diameter you want the holes to be then I think that this is relatively simple to make from what I have seen. The good thing is that it is also apparently quite easy to change the diameters and print new ones... so using them to model a design and make changes can be relatively quick, easy and cheap.

Excellent to hear as we had started looking at this... making siphons with a kind of inbuilt swirl effect - in fact, just generally making connectors or other parts with swirls built into the inside of the connector / siphon. We could also change the lip of the standpipe so that water enters it more efficiently. So many great possibilities!

My standpipes swirl when they overflow... always have...

Agreed RoO... but there still may be ways to improve them?

I started thinking more about this because I realised that when I think about a system now I think about what parts I can get hold of.... and so that automatically restricts my thinking straight away (especially in Japan!). The idea of bing able to 3D print anything that I could imagine made me wonder if we could look at things slightly differently and come up with some creative ideas, ideas that might not normally be considered, and so make improvements.

In the past it has usually been engineers and people like that who made up new things and then we, as the masses, got them when they were given to us. But I like the idea that we ourselves could come up with a great idea... have a designer be able to relatively easily model it and then print it out for testing. It is just the fact that these things are starting to become accessible to normal people (?) like you and I that is quite exciting!

Yep, the flared "affnan" style siphon is an obvious choice... as normally it's acheived by jointed connnections...

I am not just talking about siphons... although given the number of people on every single forum stating how many difficulties they have, then the re-imagination of the mechanism to consistently flood and drain a growbed without any need to tinker with flow rates, breather tubes, flared connectors, bell clearances etc isn't the siphon worth looking at and seeing if there might be a better way to do it? (and of course, I appreciate that we could just use a timer mechanism).

RoO you first mentioned about venturi's... these could be printed relatively easily by all accounts, (so how would you design it? what dimensions? How would you imagine it looking?), as well as purpose-built airlift mechanisms, someone else talked about printed filters, and Charlie's 'patent pending Yabbie ball' - all of which might be possible. Yes, we can cobble things together based on what components are already available, but isn't it a bigger challenge to imagine what is NOT currently available, and then try to design something specifically for that purpose that works better than normal DIY attempts?

I guess that is what my interest in this really is. In Japan it can be very hard to get components as we don't have the luxury of the huge DIY homestores that you have in the US, UK or Australia. Japan is not a DIY nation and so it is difficult to get even simple things that you might take for granted. This might also be the case in places like India, or developing countries, and so the idea of being able to 3D print components could make a big difference in some places.... and if we are going to do that, then why not improve on designs? Why put together jointed connections, when 1 purpose-printed piece could potentially do the job exponentially better?

Ill take some new neural paths too please

Boobs, big ones, little ones all shapes and sizes.

I would like to put a wall of boobs in my shed when I get it built

Hey better still what about a shed in the shape of a boob.

More than a handfull is a waste

Id like a replica Charlie so I can prop him up at work and I can go about my aquaponic adventures whilst getting paid..