Rough Draft- System Design

[Bradly]

Hello eveyone

I'm new to aquaponics...been reading a lot over the last week.  I drafted up a guideline to work off of in fine tuning the design, and was wondering if you all could take a quick look at the sketch and suggest anything you see that might be out of line or a bad idea?

Appreciated much your input...

BradlyAQUAPONICS-ROUGH%20DRAFT1.pdf

[TCLynx]

Yes Brandy and Lance, pretty much.  Now many people will use distrobution grids around the outside edge of the grow bed to distribute solids more evenly.  However, I've only bothered with such things on one grow bed.  Most of my beds I just have water enter at one point and exit at one point, usually I try to make them as opposite as possible but it isn't mandatory since flood and drain usually takes care of mixing pretty well.

The media and the bio-slime usually takes care of retaining most solids in the grow beds.

I have sometimes, with constant flow to the grow beds as you would have with siphons, had a slime build up where the water enters the grow bed (dubbed this fish poo pavement if for any reason it drys out) and you sometimes have to stir this slimy area with a stick to keep the water flowing down into it instead of flowing over the gravel before draining down into it, this would probably be why many people bother with distrobution grids.  With timed flood and drain, this has not been an issue for me, seems the worms have time to keep the slime from building up when there is intermittent flow.

[Jon Nose]

Your grow beds will use approx 211 gallons of water leaving 39 gallons for your fish ? ... add a sump tank beside your fish tank. Have grow beds overflow into sump ... pump from your sump to your beds.. don't need air in grow beds .. unless this is DWC ... just a thought!

[Bradly]

Jon

No, my fish tank will have a static 330 gallons quantity.  The pump will bring water up from the sump tank and drop it into the fish tank which will overflow out to the beds. My grow beds will have about 45 gals of water each when full, so I've sized my sump tank to be able to hold all water from all 3 beds in case they all drain at same time.

The sump and the fish tank will have air pumped in to help O2 the water.

Bradly

 

[Lance Rose]

All right then. Appreciate the information and detail.

TCLynx said:

Yes Brandy and Lance, pretty much.  Now many people will use distrobution grids around the outside edge of the grow bed to distribute solids more evenly.  However, I've only bothered with such things on one grow bed.  Most of my beds I just have water enter at one point and exit at one point, usually I try to make them as opposite as possible but it isn't mandatory since flood and drain usually takes care of mixing pretty well.

The media and the bio-slime usually takes care of retaining most solids in the grow beds.

I have sometimes, with constant flow to the grow beds as you would have with siphons, had a slime build up where the water enters the grow bed (dubbed this fish poo pavement if for any reason it drys out) and you sometimes have to stir this slimy area with a stick to keep the water flowing down into it instead of flowing over the gravel before draining down into it, this would probably be why many people bother with distrobution grids.  With timed flood and drain, this has not been an issue for me, seems the worms have time to keep the slime from building up when there is intermittent flow.