Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ummm, but don't you make assumptions there, you assume the clogging issue is due to solids. As I mentioned, we have beds where the grid has NEVER been cleaned and they have never clogged... Clogging tends to happen for us when roots get up into our grids.

Whether you have a slit or a hole, adventurous roots will get in if you have those types of plants growing in your beds.. And I imagine that roots will quickly clog either slit or hole, they tend to clog the whole pipe if not found reasonably quickly.

That was a joke.

The biggest problems I have had with clogging has been with filamentous algae but that wasn't going into GBS.

Being serious...I don't have any distribution network for my GBs. I have delivery pipes going to the end and drains at the other.

You certainly wouldnt want to design something to clog in a row, back pressure, mr. joker.

i know you know this, but lets not allow people who dont know this to think your joke is a good design.

Is Annal Retentive Anal Retentive or am I being a bit Anal...er... over the top??

Sorry...

That design wasn't a joke

Perfectly exceptable method. If you know something is likely to be a problem find a way to make it part of the solution.

If you where worried about it blocking completely and not noticing you could have a hole on top of the pipe at the very end or an upturned elbow. Whenever water started flowing out the end you would know it was time to clean the manifold.

I am only selectively anal retentive.

I was thinking of that as a solution, i suppose it all depends on scale.
I wouldnt want to bother trying to use that design as a work around for clogging of solids though, with a gravity fed system it is far too easy to build up back pressure and either overflow your tank or to aways have it flow out the emergency hole.

Not if you've designed the pipe network well.