New Fittings Make the Water Go Round

You can never see the end from the beginning.

     The flu thought it had me, but I triumphed. With only the time to stop in this week and momentarily reacquaint with the new parts for the bell siphon, I'm optimistic. Matt picked up a few much smaller sized fittings than what I was using before, but I think that it will make all the difference. Hopefully Friday I'll have enough time and either Josh or Matt will have enough leisure to really get past this phase with the setup so I can finally get some fish pooing and some bacteria colonizing and some plants growing. Next step is general construction on the two level system so if you hear construction-y sounds over the next week, fret not, there's men at work.

Bell Siphon Woes

It's exactly what it looks like.

     I've taken preliminary steps toward getting this bell siphon working, but it feel like one step forward, two steps back. Getting a continuous flow of water running through the siphon is what creates the suction pressure that relieves the upper tank into the lower as the pressure difference equalizes. I know now that for the tank size setup I'm using, half-inch PVC is waaay too big and would almost never allow for a continuous stream of water to form, owing to the amount of water available. Josh helped me run more than a few test runs with varying sized siphons and only twice did the bell siphon work as planned. Lesson learned, anyway.