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I've put rock in my "tops" of my totes and am about to add water, the tote tops have as usual the 2 cross bars supporting the liner.

But today on line I stumbled across a picture of a guy who ran 4-1" flat straps under the plastic liner and fastened them to the frame on either side...forming in effect a kind of sling support in 4 places to augment the 2 bars that already provide support.

Is this a necessary step in everybody's opinon? Or is your experience such that the tote top flipped upside down for growbed will usually hold the gravel and water just fine??

 

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Nevermind the question... I looked underneath the tote this morning and didn't like what I saw...the tote liner looks stressed from lack of support-so I pulled all the gravel out of both and I'm going to put 4 pcs of 3x3 steel angle across the underside and possible also some steel mesh or sheet metal to give more support to all that weight.

Sounds like a good call. I'm setting up my first system, and am using the bottom 12" of the IBC frame to support the grow bed I made from the top 12" of the IBC tote flipped over. Sounds like you already cut yours though, so I imagine some sort of wood or steel support under it will help a lot. Depending if you need to put anything else under it, you might use concrete blocks to raise it to the height you need, and then a pallet (or other large wood supports) on the concrete blocks to support the bottom of the grow bed. Might save you some steel costs...

That's a 10-4 Daniel.  I also painted outsides of all the totes previously...so I just bought $100 worth of 3" angle iron today (which I'll prime with rustoleum and then paint) to remedy this problem at those 2 grow beds ...and will add some steel mesh or heavy sheet metal underneath along with the angles to also help support the bulging underside of the liner.  First time thru something ...there's always a learning curve.   I have a little tractor ...which is the only thing that made taking the rock back out and then later having to put it all back in....bearable.  :-) 


Daniel said:

Sounds like a good call. I'm setting up my first system, and am using the bottom 12" of the IBC frame to support the grow bed I made from the top 12" of the IBC tote flipped over. Sounds like you already cut yours though, so I imagine some sort of wood or steel support under it will help a lot. Depending if you need to put anything else under it, you might use concrete blocks to raise it to the height you need, and then a pallet (or other large wood supports) on the concrete blocks to support the bottom of the grow bed. Might save you some steel costs...

What I've just done is put my growbed and frame on a pallet.  I was fooling around getting the siphon to work and noticed that the tote was sagging down on either side of those two brackets.  That seems to do the trick.

Yeah I know Bobby... I'm telling you with gravel and water that's a LOT of weight.  I'm attaching a photo of how I braced with angle iron.  The bigger iron is 3"x3" and the smaller is 1-1/2" x1-1/2"...and I used wood on top of those to shim the spaces to the bottom of the upside down tote- the heights vary a lot on the ones that I got.

 

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