Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

THere are videos out there just have to put up with the "Glen" and what ever whatsit dialogue every 15s.

I want figures. It is all very well for them to say that there are massive electrical savings but with out any figures you cant know what they are talking about.

I checked out that video some time ago, it looked a bit like smoke and mirrors.

No hard figures to compare air lifts with pumps.

Firstly this is a complicated system, which is custom made for each application.

Air pumps by their nature tend to be inefficient because they make a lot of heat when compressing air.

Air lifts seem to like deep water tanks to draw from.

I found this mammoth pump calculation but I'm to tired and have sampled to many beers to put the formulas into excel and do some calculations. Note 2.81kg/h of air to move 1.67kg/h sludge

I would guess the power calc would be similar to the olomana garden system, the check valve in their system will raise the head it can lift, but it is also another power user.

Electric pumps are simple to use and efficient, but I'd like to make an air lift one day just for fun.

I'm not an engineer but I'm not sure the math applies to all air-lift style pumps since it's for a regular air-lift pump where the air and water are mixed and not a geyser airlift pump, where your trying to form a bubble that is the diameter of the pipe to send slugs of water through the pipe. Might be a special case

Stuart - I can't remember exactly what he said but he didn't talk about how high they lifted the water just that they had achieved flows of around 600 gallons using a wattage that was either in the 30 or 60 watt range (can't remember which). So, no you can't calculate it but for the same wattage in a good electrical water pump you can deliver that flow in most normal systems. I think the efficiency of electrical water pumps might drop faster as you increase head height but who knows .

I have seen Glen talking about this for several years now but see no efficiency gain by using this method. The only advantages I see are that #1 he can put an air pump remote so it doesn't get stolen and #2 they use lava cinders in their grow beds... Which Glen says will chew up and ruin submersible pumps but not an airlift.

He was doing a demonstration in Arizona last year and I took his numbers over to a pump catalog...a danner mag drive submersible pump had less watt draw and greater flow rate at the indicated head pressure.

Moving water with air is cool... But not 90% more efficient.

I might be getting a handle on this social interaction thing...

maybe.

Maybe not to. Or at least not this internet thing.



The above post was meant to follow

Oh dear

Instead of all this guessing why don't we invite the Dr to join the conversation and give us the figures we are needing to prove disprove the claims.

Personally
I can't see how an air lift pump can be more efficient than a centrifugal pump but I have limited knowledge of either.

My other concern is the noise of most air compressors / pumps would piss my neighbours of and they would sabotage my system.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there are similar problems with air flow as there are with water flow over distance concerning resistance?
If theft is a problem?
Get a dog
Actually, come to think of it, in some countries they are more likely to steal the dog.
The pump is in the bottom of a big( or small) pond of water the fish are in water the plants are out in the open, if anything is going to get stolen... You would think it's going to be the plants.

The pictures on the site you linked to EB suggest some really high head one at the bottom of a bridge to the top of a bridge looks to me to be at least 10 meters air lift might be more efficient at that sort of lift. That might be where a 90% saving is meant. But a ram pump operates nearly free. Just can't use one in aquaponics system without another source of running water.

EB I suggest you (as the owner of this forum) invite the Dr to join us here to put the matter in open debate.
We might all learn something .

Good sugestion.


Yes and no or rather no and yes.

Air being so less viscous will travel along a pipe with stuff all friction compared to water.

However, that is really only the case if you use a pipe of comparable size to that which you would use for water. Since the friction losses in pipes transporting air are so much less people regularly use much smaller pipes which of course increases the velocity of the air flow which of course massively increases the friction losses. So yes you can have significant even massive friction losses.


For the small system I'm looking at now the pumps weigh about 150kg each. I would have though the fish would have been the first target of thieves followed by workshop tools.


Hope so.

Please exchange with
I was not laughing at any body
Fat finger syndrome

The time out on the edit function is annoying is it not?

I don't think the systems I was looking at on his web site had any where near that capacity.
150kg pump? I guess size does matter.
Fish won't get stolen unless the thieves bring a net. Have you ever tried to grab your fish out of your tank free hand? Only way to do it would be deoxygenate the water or shock stun the fish
But this is not the topic here
150 kg pump small if my biggest pump goes 1.5 kg and my smallest pump is about 15 grams.

Some what but I fully understand it
I was in a forum that was decimated by a very prominent member going thru and removing his some two thousand posts and then deleting himself, it made some threads painful to read.
I believe someone tried that here hence the limited edit time.

That is what happened here and that is why we don't have the indefinite edit function that we use to have.

No praise due yet because I haven't got anything beyond my back yard 10kL FT system built yet.

That pump is to turn over 65l/s to a 4m head the system it would be for would be able to produce about 5t of fish and 35t of veg per annum.

lol if someone wants to manually edit over 2000 posts, good luck to them, thier hard work should be rewarded by success.
being able to edit would be nice, not deleting though, ive also seen people delete hundreds of posts/ threads and ruin forums