Air line thought

[Alan McKnight]

Hi, Would it be possible to use laser tubing in the media beds to supply air to the the water and plants?

[Jim Fisk]

I hate to sound ignorant but what the hell is "laser tubing"?

[Bart]

You're not alone there Jim LOL  

It sounds very cool though.

[Vlad Jovanovic]

I'm not sure if this is what Alan meant or not...but, when i by drip irrigation tubing/tape for my fields, it comes in two basic flavors around here. One is PP tubing/irrigation tape in which a laser has "drilled" a small hole every 30cm (or whatever)...The other, still PP tubing/tape actually has an metal (albeit barely thicker than tin-foil) emmiter embedded in the plastic at 30cm (or whatever) intervals.

Maybe Alan meant this irrigation type tape/tubing?

[Alan McKnight]

I meant the irrigation tubeing that has the holes drilled by a laser.  aka PP tubing.  No metal to mess up the fish.

Vlad Jovanovic said:

I'm not sure if this is what Alan meant or not...but, when i by drip irrigation tubing/tape for my fields, it comes in two basic flavors around here. One is PP tubing/irrigation tape in which a laser has "drilled" a small hole every 30cm (or whatever)...The other, still PP tubing/tape actually has an metal (albeit barely thicker than tin-foil) emmiter embedded in the plastic at 30cm (or whatever) intervals.

Maybe Alan meant this irrigation type tape/tubing?

[Jim Fisk]

Hey Alan, if you have some do some experimenting and let us know. Sounds very interesting. I still use the 10-12" air stones from Walmart that you can plug together and make any length. I use 2 in each FT zip tied to the tops of my waste PU tubes and have been very pleased. They run about 3.00 each and have been problem free for these 9 mos. so far

That method also draws the fish waste right to the outflow pipe due to the fairly large up draft current they create. Saves on a lot of clean-ups and the fish play in it all day.

[Japan Aquaponics - アクアポニックス 日本]

We have used agriculture tubing (which I think are the same as your laser tubing) to deliver air to growbeds and it worked just fine as far as we could see.  We tried it in both media beds and DWC and it seemed good.  The agricultural tubing we used was flexible, and flat when not in use (not rigid pipe), but had holes all along the length. We had no problems with it and it was cheaper than other alternatives.