designing a system but not sure

[Johnson L Brown]

Has anyone tried the raft system with grow beds in the end of the water cycle?

Just curious if you can get by with a closed loop with rafts.

[Alex Veidel]

You mean a raft system with media beds?

[Rob Nash]

this would be considered backwards.. you want the media beds to do the filtering before the water goes to the rafts.

[Johnson L Brown]

I am waiting for Sylvia Bernsteins book coming to our library.  I'll have to do some more reading to get a better understanding.

Thank you very much for the info.

[Johnson L Brown]

Yes on the rafts with media beds

Alex Veidel said:

You mean a raft system with media beds?

[Alex Veidel]

Yep, totally works. Like Rob said, you want to put the media beds before the raft system, so they can collect the solids before entering the raft beds.

Johnson L Brown said:

Yes on the rafts with media beds

Alex Veidel said:

You mean a raft system with media beds?

[Steve R]

You can easily use your media beds as a prefilter for your rafts yes.

[Vlad Jovanovic]

Yup, media beds before rafts. Just don't do anything silly like use a "cascading" arrangement for the grow beds...where the first bed rains into the second bed, which drains into the third bed etc...the first bed will always be catching the gist of the solids (not a good scheme).

Use an indexing (sequencing) valve to distribute water from the fish tank to your media beds so that the beds all get roughly the same amount of solids and effluent.

http://community.theaquaponicsource.com/profile/VladJovanovic

[Jim Fisk]

If you have a sump after the media beds that pumps back up to your fish tanks you can simply tap into that for raft beds. That is how we are setting them up this Summer. I have such a tap already traveling to my wood stove and will simply keep it going to the new raft bed. All the nitrates are in that water and it couldn't get any more filtered than that. From there it simply drains back to the sump.

[Johnson L Brown]

all good information.   thanks a bunch