Aquaponics - Any volume in, any volume out bell siphon

For my next trick, I'll attempt to make a bell siphon that triggers no mater what flow rate is applied, and then stops decisively.

I'm not entirely sure why this idea needs inventing, but it might be useful in a windmill powered aquaponics system, or a solar system without any battery.

Who knows.

My last post got me worried about the thought that I might "invent" something and claim it to be original even though someone else has already done it. If I didn't know about deer scarers, I might have eventually come up with the idea and presented my new idea to the world only to look like I whacked a 6000 year old monk on the head and ran off with his blueprints.

I'm not really sure what to do about this, other than to say I'll never knowingly claim an idea if I know it already exists. But, I'm not going to spend my life searching and checking patent records to make sure that it doesn't already exist. It's not as if I'm selling anything, and I have too many ideas and too little time to expend that much effort. I guess it doesn't really matter to anyone else but me, so you are probably finding this paragraph to be one of my more boring efforts.

So, I was thinking about buying a new pump and making a new system, but I thought I'd try to power it with wind energy, heat it with passive solar hot water, and perhaps make it a snail farming version of aquaponics. It's a pity I cant make a cow-ponics system in my suburban back yard, because then I could also grow some cheese in it.

Sadly, I couldn't figure out a way to add self promoting links to the handmade fishing lures, and mold making sections of my blog.

So, anyway, snails have the ability to seal themselves up for a few days if the pump isn't doing a lot so a flaky home made system powered by the vagaries of the weather will be more likely to work with snails than fish. The pump would only need to supply enough water to to keep the bacteria happy.

With this in mind, my pumping will be an extremely variable thing. So what I'll need is a siphon that triggers no matter what I put into it, and then stops no matter what as well.

That's a lot of "no matter what's".

I have a vague idea here, but really don't know if this one will work, so whatever you do, don't be telling anyone of my amazing breakthrough just yet.

I wont be.

2 comments:

  1. My thoughts were tending towards a roof whirlybird and a peristaltic pump to an elevated resevoir. Ludicrously inefficient, but a bucket of fun to play with.

    Nom

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's a cool pump.
    Milking a cow basically.
    I love it.

    ReplyDelete

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