Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hee! That would've been convenient, but I've never seen it around here and the angle grinder is fast and fun.


The zillion-holes method is pretty darn tiresome all right! The angle grinder method is a lot faster. I've also wrapped mesh (plastic insect netting intended for screen doors that I had left over from making the lids for my filters, sort of sewn into a tube with stainless steel wire) around the PVC, to make sure the smaller bits of scoria and expanded clay don't work their way through the slots. A nice unintended side effect is that it makes it very easy to rotate the pipe - that'll come in handy when I need to clean out roots and so forth!

+100 from me,love the enthusiasm in your thread.......

I am having so much fun! And pain. My back and assorted joints are very unhappy about washing gravel and letting me know about it. But mostly fun!

My husband helped me wash gravel yesterday afternoon, so that went much faster and we got one growbed's worth of gravel done; the expanded clay for the top layer is much easier to wash, so I should have that one running today.

Gravel...


and expanded clay on top!


The water is running, the siphon is working, and I officially have a running aquaponics system in my hoop house.

One growbed down, seven to go...

Hey Mel, I didn't wash my clay balls. They were relatively clean compared with the scoria. Might be able to save your back a little

Mine are filthy! There's about a cup of grit in the bottom of each bag, and a nice thick layer on the bottom of the wash tub after I tip it out. Cleaner than the scoria and much easier to wash, but it still needs doing.

(And I'm happy to report that we must've done a good job, because there's only a trace of dust coming out of the running growbed into the sump. )

You must have done an excellent job.

I set up one system without washing the clay balls and the water was stained for about 12 hours then the red dust was all over the bottom of my sump tank.

The next time, I washed the balls really well... far longer than my patience would normally allow. And the water was stained for about 12 hours and guess what was on the floor of my ST?

Clearly I have devised an awesome washing method! I was determined to do better than the first time, too - I started to wash the scoria but got fed up with it really quickly, and ended up just setting up the growbeds then rinsing from the top with the hose while running the drain into the garden. Got out a ton of red dust and thought I'd be fine, hooked everything up, and ended up with dark red water and the inevitable layer in the sump.

Photo of the sump after running the system overnight to prove I'm not lying through my teeth:



(Full disclosure: I put a basket lined with geotextile under the growbed outlet for the first couple of hours yesterday afternoon, and it did pick up a little dust, but nowhere near the amount I was expecting. )

lol, cleaner than my sump tank

I bet it won't stay that clean for long, but it's nice while it lasts!

Mel, did you use a cutting wheel on your grinder, or a grinding wheel for the slots on the media guards?

Probably wont matter. Except for the width of the slots. I used a metal cut off saw to slot my media guards, The pvc cuts sweetly at the speed the blade is running.

I used a grinding wheel. It makes a heck of a lot of fine dust, but cuts very neatly and quickly. I was a little worried it might heat up and start melting the pipe instead of cutting it, but I haven't run into that at all (probably because it's such a small job and it has time to cool down between guards).

A cutting wheel will work - that's how I did the slots on the bottom of my SLO, cut in and then pushed sideways a bit to widen the cut - but I didn't want to do that for the media guards, I wanted wider slots and pushing sideways *that* much would probably end up snapping it.

Just looked back at the last page and saw the pic of my media guards, you can see that one of them has some narrower slots - I started that one with a thinner grinding wheel, but it didn't fit the angle grinder correctly and the locking nut wouldn't lock. When it started undoing itself I decided that going with the thicker wheel (that fit properly!) and adding mesh to make sure the media won't fall through the slots was the wiser route.