Quote Originally Posted by bcotton
It sounds like you are thinking more of a constant flow with media than nft on the towers. NFT is nutrient film technique and you would be running the nutrient water over the roots with no media. You may be able to make this work with media. Your obstacles will be weight and still solids. Sand and pea gravel will be too small. The solids will build up on the top and eventually cause clogging. Large media like 1Inch should allow the solids to pass through you will just want to make sure they don't accumulate at the bottom of the tower and make a anaerobic area. Like i said before. i have heard of people having success with this. Maybe someone with direct experience will chime in on strawberry towers.

My personal preference is to design the system in a way that it will run off of one pump. This is more efficient power consumption and theoretically more frequent pump failures (all pumps fail eventually). if you can't get around two pumps you need to design it in a way that it doesn't empty your fish tank if a pump failure happens or a pump failure will be catastrophic.

If your bell siphon works it will naturally produce a lot of aeration. I am not sure you need to specifically consider that. bell siphons are hard enough to tweak as it is.

np,

brian

brian
I was thinking more along the lines of several horizontal pipes, but I like the idea of a vertical system like the strawberry tower. Since strawberry jar pots can be used for strawberries or herbs, it seems that it would work just fine for a bunch of herbs as well as strawberries. One used plastic drinking bottles, I'm sure I can adapt it to soda bottles (bit bigger). Deep enough to grow just about any plant I want, unless it needs more root space than the bottle has.

I was planning to have the pump in the fish tank. Not sure how I would filter the water before the strawberry tower without a second pump. Unless something like having the pump under a net pot, inside a second container filled with filter media?