Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thankyou for sharing your fubar Gemmell, it helps us all. Such a simple thing but with massive consequences.
As an aside, your twin starred in the cats win over the saints last night. He has got rid of the pornstar mo, but is going like a good thing atm.

good drawings! very effective at explaining. It's definitely very simple things like that, that anyone can & does slip up on, for anything..

twintragics: ..was he carrying a sledgehammer in the game?

none required purrsikat, he's a human steamroller.

Updates updates updates. No pictures yet.

I got a B* pump, it was labelled as a 250 model, when I opened it up, it was a 350 model! pretty happy with that for $100!

Ran 240V in black pipe out to greenhouse. Should be pretty safe, it's not buried (the idea being if you can see it, you won't put a shovel through it) and runs along the fenceline.

Now to the problems: I put the pump in my current sump (a half barrel underneath the grow beds) and it just isn't going to be deep enough to trip the float switch. So I put a black bin further down and a bit of hose from my half barrel to the black bin. This might actually work out for me because the half barrel underneath my grow beds is going to act kind of like a filter - anything that falls in there will sink to the bottom and won't be reintroduced into the system. The pump will sit in the black bin and pump water back up to the tank (IBC).

I also bought all sorts of pipe, including a $50 4 way hose splitter with adjustable flow rates. This is connected to the IBC's outlet via 25mm poly pipe and various adapters and is gravity fed. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like my flow rate onto the beds is going to be enough to actually fill the beds (I've just got stand pipes at the moment). It drains as quickly as it fills, or if it does fill it's doing so VERY slowly.

So it's time to take the plunge. Autosiphons. I've been wanting an excuse anyway. I think I can take out my 20mm stand pipes and put in a 20/35mm bell autosiphon without having to disturb the 90mm pipe around the outside.

My only question about this is whether I actually NEED the u-bend for the autosiphon to work. I guess I'll just make one and find out.

It also means I'll have to take back the solenoid valve and 240V-24V transformer. Wasted effort that.

I don't have a U bend gemmell. Provided the pipe going from the bed is close to the horizontal the siphon seems to start okay. My siphon has a 25mm inner and 50mm outer (both pressure pipe), within the 100mm outside pipe.

Good luck with it - it is all about getting the inflow so it is not so high as to stop the siphon from stopping and not too low to stop it from starting.

Hmmm - must try it that way when I setup the small system in the GH.

Gemmell 35mm 2nd pipe would be the minimum size you could use, go for either 40 or 50mm so as not to restrict water flow in the area between the 2 pipes

Like the extra bit of ooomph you got in the pump for no extra cost

Admit it Gemmell - you changed it over didn't you

sssshhhhuuuusshhhh!

les, remember the syphon i did that broke all the rules? with a bit more fine tuning it has been working day in day out since the phone call. no U bend, no air line i think the srick is that there is a degree or two rise in the horizontal before it goes to the ibc and elbows down.

I'm assuming the airlock form in this horizontal

Yours sounds quite similar to mine Steve. Mine does have an air line - but I'm not sure that it is doing much for me - after all the siphon doesn't break until after the water reaches the crenelations. All that the airline seems to do is slow down the siphon a bit, which is what also happens when it gets to the crenelations. It takes a couple of minutes of sucking air before my siphon breaks. My theory is that during this process the water level is ever so gradually getting lower and lower until enough air is sucked to break the siphon.

our syphons sit at the back of the bus, brake all the rulez

I've chucked a sickie today. Expect some photos and a report on my foray into auto-siphons (which makes me a real aquaponicist - washing rocks AND auto siphons).

Remember now...using the u-bend makes for a more spectacular water entry back to the tank do 2 of them and have dual exhausts

gemmel, that fact that you are chucking a sickie to play AP shows true dedication !

Wow. What a day I had. Everything went right, from me taking my 240V to 24V transformer back without a receipt to my first auto siphon working first time... in fact they all worked first time. My god these things rock.

Here is the formula for my success, largely due to Les' words here: http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/forum ... hp?p=16994

Ingredients
20mm inner tube
40mm outer tube (b* didn't have 50mm end caps, so I got 40mm pipe)
6mm air tube

Putting it together
Crenelations of about 20/20 (20mm legs with 20mm gaps, I measured out 10/10 but it was too hard to cut, so I just went two or three at a time)
20mm gap between top of outer tube and top of inner tube
Air tube 10mm below top of inner tube (and thus 30mm below top of outer tube)
An elbow about a couple of cm below the outlet with a little bit of pipe attached. Still not sure what this provides.

The best thing about the air tube is that it keeps the inner tube in place! Anyway, 4 built, 4 worked. Most awesome thing I have ever seen. Period.

I'm an autosiphons fan boy now. I've even got a bucket and an auto siphon that I'm take to a party tonight to give a demo. I'm a mobile autosiphon pimp. Seriously though, where did this idea come from? We didn't make it up here on the forums... did we? I remember reading steves loop auto siphon thread and thinking it was rad, did you really "invent" the Bell autosiphon Les or was it borrowed from somewhere else?

I've got some photos which I'll put up soon. You know you people have ruined me? I can't sleep at night because I'm thinking of how to do the next system. I haven't even got this one working.

Oh that reminds me, I was going to try something a little different - instead of siliconing the drain tube into the grow bed so that it doesn't leak, I was going to just put a 50mm pipe cut in half (length ways) to act as a catcher tray underneath. The catcher tray just carrys the drips from the pipe to the sump. This way I don't have to silicone anything. This makes taking the siphon in and out very easy. What do the AP gods think of this?