Drained Sump Walk
Perhaps this should be in a list of Bad ideas I came up with. See I had thought to have the first two grow beds drain into this “tank” under the walk way that would then drain into the big tank via a float valve and thereby reduce the amount of water level fluctuations in the fish tank.
This did not work.
Float Valves large enough to keep up with the pump will rarely operate properly with so little water pressure behind them and float valves that large are not common either.
installing overflow pipe
So, the Sump Walk basically operated as a very large open top flow through channel that the two beds dumped into and it then drained into the fish tank. After a very heavy rain storm I decided I needed to set up an overflow and I plumbed through the sump walk to manage this.
At a later date we had trouble with critters getting into the sump walk and we later removed it altogether.
My word of advice, every part of your system should be fairly easy to access. If it is a pain to get at, you will rarely bother to inspect it and when there is a problem, it will be even more of a pain to deal with.
sump walk with lava rock and overflow
So Bad idea number 1 making a difficult to access tank under a walkway.
Bad idea number 2 (actually a bigger bad idea I think) should probably be the lumber/liner grow beds (but as of the time frame of these pictures, that discover is still far in the future.) See, Florida is major termite territory (avoiding ground contact is no guarantee that the termites won’t get to the wood.)
For those who wish to go read the detail version check out my original system thread. BYAP System Thread Pages 41 (May 26, 2008) is the time frame for this Blog post.
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