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Comment by Noah Howard on May 30, 2014 at 4:18pm

Hey Keith,

Appreciate your input.. I have actually never heard that algae causes nutrient problems... I was under the impression that they really only fed off of the sun.... But I don't think that there will too much of a problem with algae being on the media when the plants grow over it. So far there hasn't been any growing on their system... and I also have two systems that are also barrel systems run the same as the ones we build in Kenya and I haven't really had an algae problem on the media... however, the gutters do accumulate algae, but we just clean it out as needed.

Comment by Keith Rowan on May 30, 2014 at 2:29pm

looks good!  but a couple of things..

the way you have your water going into the growbeds, you'll get algae on the surface of the media.. when your system is running, the top layer of media should be dry

you'll probably want to cover that common drain as well to keep algae from growing there...

algae will consume the nutrients that you want your plants to consume

and add some media to those growbeds