OK, I know I'm slow at getting pics up, so here's some that will kinda show how my system is designed ...... some of these were taken earlier, some later, when I killed almost everything, including my carp (goldfish) .....
First, the whole thing -- takes up about 2'x4' of floor space, but it goes up 11' in the air the 1x2's with the dowels sticking through them, hanging down the sides are for the squash, cukes, and the watermelon to grow up on ..... they all turned out to be minis, so I didn't need to go to all the trouble of making them
Next, some pics of the top level I'm actually planning to go one more level above this, as I perfect the system;
The drains coming from the upper level distribute the water through a manifold underneath the gravel, that I built to be sure that the water flows from the bottom of the grow-bed to the top, making sure that the water gets changed every cycle;
The grow-beds are on the lower level, just above the fish tank; this is the first grow-beds, with a bell siphon, but the 18" of gravel and water bulged the sides so much, I didn't trust it ...
the Bell siphon;
So I went to 6"deep sterilite grow-beds using no-holes siphons;
I had trouble with the no-holes siphon design, it had to be weighted down, wasn't stable, fell apart sometiimes, etc.
So I designed a new one, all one piece, with a sturdier spreader bar .... works great! I will be doing away with the larger one when I harvest the first crop;
And last of all, the fish tank ;
If you look at the last pic closely, you can see the PVC hidey-holes for the crawdads ..... they are pretty fast, I had 10 full grown Guppies including two males ..... I have three females left and a few babies ....... at least the crawdads know how to get themselves fresh supper
I've got a lot of plastic weeds in there now to give the guppies a place to hide so they can procreate and provide more ferts
Now you've seen the 1st experimental system that I've built .... I got more plans, but my wallet just won't let me put those plans into practice My apologies for the differences in the pics, these pics were taken at different times to replace some that didn't turn out, etc., so they're really out of order/sync ...... in that last pic, the second cup in on the left, is the lettuce, that was several weeks ago, and it hasn't got any bigger since!