Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

You got a lot of reading to do KP..... hehe

I know...
Bordering on Legend in less than a month... Some might say I talk too much and don't listen... Some would anyhow.

Well I am almost divorced and I am not even married yet. I can safely say I have read 95% of this forum.

Tim, how much harder is it to read the full 100%? Lots

There was a time that i could have said i read EACH and EVERY post. i simply cant do it anymore


lol, at nearly 100,000 posts 99% would mean that i've missed out on 1000 posts, so i recon it would have to be 99.5%

Nice list on the gravel washing Tim

There was a thread many months back on gravel washing designs SNAG, think the best one was the drum from a washing machine - the sad part about it, they (meaning all the mods and the senior members at the time) waited until I had washed my gravel before coming up with all the ingenious ideas

hmm we have curb side collection here maybe i can score a free gravel washer 3000 ( washing machine )

Could they handle the weight?

If you remove the drum, they have a big hole in the middle... perhaps you could rig it up as a trommel...

Hey yeah! Who's willing to build a trommel with me that we can ship to each new APer (for an ever decreasing fee to help pay for the thing)???

Trommel's are neat and would wash gravel a treat!

...another brilliant idea was to hire a empty cement mixer for the day and have it visiting all the different BYAP sites

...and then there was going to the local ramps and run the trailer full of gravel into the lake/river a couple of times

...all real helpful

I (collectively in a family way) own a cement mixer. I considered this, but couldn't see how it's be that great, how would you reuse the water? (a cement mixer is 1/2 way to a trommel already... a trommel would be so nice... *drool*

I like the boat ramp one...tee hee...but I was thinking dry sieving would get rid of the grannular fines and using some sort of filtration (doesn't need to be very efficient, dacron floss from pillows in a barrel would work fine) to clear the setup whilst bacteria setting up.

Sad part about the boat ramp would be the trailer fills with water then continues in its reverse motion (glug...glug...glug )

Did that with my boat once, forgot about the bungs...at least it washed the fish scales out of the bilge.

I was washing gravel yesterday.
More than once, I looked at my portable cement mixer and thought....
"All I have to do is drill lots of holes in it !"

Theres another method that uses no water at all... Winnowing, working next door to a soil yard I see this on the windy days, on a really windy day the dust cloud as he tips the gravel into a trailer can be incredible. If it's poured slowly, and the wind is pretty strong you would have next to no cleaning to do....

Perhaps a big fan for the calm days....

What about a mesh frame, turned into a giant sifter.... The vibrational motion should be able to dislodge and remove most of the really fine stuff.