Finishing off the Plumbing

You may recall a few posts ago I was testing my overflow drain and it was a partial success. Once the syphon got running things looked great but the 1" pipe was not large enough to keep up with the inflow of my pump. If I had let things go there would have been quite a flood. So here is version 2.




As you may be able to tell I have gone with a larger pipe (2") and modified the position of the T fitting. What you can't see is that on the grow bed side there is no stand pipe so the drain will be pulling from the bottom instead of skimming of the top. This solves one problem in that I hope to minimize the amount of air that can enter the pipe and allow the drain to maintain syphon. The problem is the drain will empty the grow bed if the pump shuts down, solution raise the t-fitting to a height that determines the minimum water level. In order to make the height adjustable I installed a compression fitting so I can raise and lower the T-fitting height.

With the new drain in place and design changes complete all thats left is to test so I turned on the pump and sucked the air out of the syphon to get things running and it was a thing of beauty.The water level came up and the drain started to flow perfectly for about an hour... What I didn't account for was a less than perfect seal in the check valve it was ever so slowly letting air leak in and eventually breaking the syphon. Time to find a better check valve. While searching the google machine I couldn't help but think about the problems that would arrise if the drain ever failed which led me to "improving the design".

Version 2 and a 1/2: 

I found a youtube video where a guy added a small pump to constantly pull air and water from the top of the syphon now thats an elegant solution. Of course in my typical over the top fashion I also added a filter to prevent the pump from clogging. The system has run for 24 hours without any issues. I feel very confident that this will run as long as the pumps do, in the event that something clogs or a pump does go out its my plan to add 2 float switches on the grow bed water level that will shut off the pumps if the water gets to high or low. This will let me sleep at night.

Always remember fellas "If women don't find you handsom, they better find you handy". I'll be sure to update you on the progress with the switches as soon as I get to them.

Time to eat some Mosquitoes!

I bought some Mosquito fish on friday and put them into my grow beds. Hopefully they are hungry for some Mosquito larve and not plant roots.


Its hard to see them all but there are 32 in the bag. I plan to put eight into each grow bed. Since one of my beds isen't finished yet I will put 16 into the 3' X 8' and move 8 into the 4' X 8' next week when it up and running.

Here is the first grow bed and when I pulled the net pot out 6 of the pests flew out. Sorry I didn't get a picture of one of them.

A new home for my little workers. This new bed dosen't have much for them to eat yet so I will have to feed them until the plants get established. They are supposed to eat algae too so hopefully this will help keep things clean.

Pest - What to do

It has been quite a while since I've updated my blog so today is the first of many new postes to come. We have been on a couple family trips and I've had some business travel so the aquaponics has mostly been fending for itself. Fortunately things seem to be doing quite well and plants continue to grow at a rampant pace. We now have peas that have flowered and are growing pods in only 4 weeks from planting. Beans are not doing as well in the same 4 weeks but the plant is growing. The fastest grower is a cucumber plant that exploded and now has 13 buds that I could count. My lettuce is almost ready to harvest again so we are looking forward to fresh salads soon.

On the negative side, I am seeing an awful lot of small bugs like aphids, fruit flys etc. To combat this problem and to remain organic we have ordered 2000 lady bugs to hopefully colonize the aquaponics garden area. They should arrive by tomorrow and I will tack some pictures and update how the release goes.

The second and more pressing issue is that last night I pulled out a lettuce plant to check its roots and out flew 4 to 5 mosquitoes. I know what did I expect having a large body of water is bound to create a breeding ground for the little disease caring pests. Not to fear, I have the Google machine right at my finger tips. Unfortunately lady bugs aren't the best at catching mosquitoes so I need a better plan, fish should eat their larve but that only helps in the fish tank and leaves the grow-beds defenseless since the fish would likely eat the plant roots killing their growth potential. My friends at www.friendlyaquaponics.com must have an answer so off to their site I went. After some searching on their site and in the manual I got from them I was able to locate the answer and its a good one, mosquito fish! These little beauties will eat the mosquito larve, other bug larve, algae and clean the plant roots effectively helping things grow even better. Not to mention the Friendly folks swear that they never see mosquitoes on their property any more, no mosquitoes in Hawaii thats cool.

I have found a local source for Mosquito fish http://phoenixtropicalfishinc.com/ and I plan to stop there on my way home tonight. I'll blog about the addition of these guys into my system tonight.