Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This is fantastic! What is your grow bed volume?

ahh totally get it! nice tweak

Thank you!

The internal measurements of the GB are 136" x 25" x 11" so 21.6 cubic feet or 0.61 cubic metres

Thanks! Unfortunately I had a catastrophe last night. My siphon didn't start and lost some water I must have watched the thing 30 to 40 times yesterday without fail. It figures that it would fail overnight!

put a safety overflow on the highest point of your growbed then back to sump:

See Guitarwes's thread


And

Thanks, that's a very good idea. I will defiantly be doing that!

So I was having trouble with my bell siphon and was reading this thread viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6544 and one of the comments was that you need to make the water spin to make a vortex, like when you turn a pop bottle upside down and spin it to make the water come out faster. So that gave me an idea, and I came up with this...





This seemed to work not bad as a stand pipe, you could almost see the water start to turn in. The water of course is not moving very fast at all. So then came the bell...



I had to make the hole bigger a couple of times, but I have finally gotten it all figured out. It starts and stops every time and works a whole lot better then what I had before. I have no idea if the "scoops" that I put on the top of my stand pipe made a difference or not, but it works and that's all that counts

Is that the only hole at the bottom of your siphon?


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Lol, I was like yeah that's the only hole I have, then I realized what you were getting at... I have this on the bottom sandwiched between the bottom and my stand pipe.

Here's another water test. Most things are the same, but I think the ammonia is higher.

Well today I built a good part of my GB...



I still have to put in the rest of the legs, then the liner. You can get a good idea of what it's going to look like. There is certainly a lot less room in the GH now



Still have a lot of work to do though, but it's getting there.

hey thats really neat! I love how you made the bed then you have the strut supports sitting there - makes it easy for others to see the construction process.

Thanks jayendra, I will take a better picture of the strut supports so that you can see them better.

I have the floor of the GB recessed into the sides as well, that way everything sits flush at the bottom of the GB. Once I get the rest of the legs in I will screw the floor and sides to the legs.

Once that's done, I will then drill the hole for the siphon. Next I am going to put an underly in to protect the pond liner from splinters and such. After that I will instal the pond liner.

I will take pictures as I go this time so that people can see the process better.

Really nice build

Thanks!

So I went and got some comets today, 40 of them, to help with the cycle. I also decided to do something about the bottom of my SLO, the open ended pipe probably would have sucked up my fish. So I came up with this...





I also managed to get the rest of the legs in under the GB.