Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thought I might share a waste of time and potentially money that I recently caused myself in the hopes that other newer people to aquaponics get into a more "what could the simplest solution be".

I have two moving bed bio reactors in my system which use bottle caps as the media. In the earliest days I had some playing around to settle on a flow rate that didn't result in overflowing if the sump tank was over two thirds full (less head height for the pump to overcome).

Once I got things happy a couple of weeks passed and then I started having an issue where I was getting them both overflowing, after giving it some thought I decided as both outlets connected together and then flowed to the sump tank that maybe the flow from both was too much for the pipe to the sump to handle (even though it is the same size as the flow coming from the fish tank so rule number one don't invent fake physics to explain your problems).

After running a second pipe work so that each MBBR had it's own run to the sump as well as being connected together, one of them no longer had any overflow issues but the other now had twice the overflow issue.

So what was my problem in the end? One bottle cap had found it's way into the bulk head fitting where it was too big to continue into the pipe. Before I modified the pipework MBBR 1 would flow into MBBR 2 to even the water level before continuing to the sump which was able to happen due to the cap acting like a one way valve.
After adding a new path for MBBR 1 to flow to the sump, MBBR 2 now overflowed anything that came into it as the cap prevented any flow out.

Luckily enough for me I wanted to get the system to a point where I can bypass any one part of the system so the extra work/cost is ok BUT...

The overall take away is don't try and over complicate what any problem could be, if something was working and now it seems to not work, check each part of the system to rule out a simple problem before making life harder for yourself.

I'm a big fan of making life hard for myself.I always seem to do it