The Trough was a project born out of trial and error. When I started the aquaponics project two years ago, my vision was to have it all in a carport tent. It didn’t quite go as I planned, but I learned a tremendous amount of what to do and what not to do. As far as the plants were concerned, I found out that they all leaned toward the opening of the tent, and since my grow beds could not be move… well, you get the idea. I also found out that some plants can grow really big and overshadow the smaller ones. The winter of 2012/2013 was a tough one for us here. Five days of below freezing for 12 hours a day. It wiped out every plant in my barrels except for the mint.

The Trough project actually is two parts, one part is the trough, the other is the tank.

Design Requirements
1. Need the ability to move plants quickly if needed – move them indoors if necessary to avoid freezing temperatures.
2. Also need to be able to move plant containers apart to accommodate for large growth. Plants will get plenty of water, must have light also.
3. Attach the plant containers to a water source that also served as a home for fish to generate the required nutrients for the plants.
4. Capacity needed to be six plants of good size – my goal was for the starters to be tomato plants.
5. Buckets need to be food-grade. I didn’t want plants I would be eating from be growing in plastic made from questionable materials. Some plastic is food grade, some is not.
6. Controllable water flow to each bucket should be easily adjustable.
7. Size of container needs to be large enough to accommodate the plant without having to continually transplant to larger container.
8. Each bucket should have the capacity to be electronically monitored (water level).
9. Electronic/wireless water chemistry monitoring.

During it’s stay during 2013 next to the tent, the trough went through several design changes. The first one was the water return system. As you can see in the pictures above, I have a 2″ PVC pipe under the buckets to return the water to the tank. My initial water tests proved this pipe did not have the capacity to handle the amount of water flow draining from the buckets, so the inside of the trough was re-enforced and lined with some pond liner material I had spare.

Inside my tent, I had three barrels configured with bell siphons. These took quite a bit of fine tuning, but once done, they required very little adjustments. My idea was to do the same with the buckets. I also controlled the water flow into the barrels with PVC ball valves. These valves turned out to be very difficult to adjust smoothly.

So, I made a test concept bucket using a Home Depot bucket to see if things worked correctly – and they did. However, I did not do this bucket test with planting medium – what is the saying about hind-sight? 20/20? Mark this one as the second design change. Once I had filled the bucket with expanded clay pellets, the water capacity went from 4 gallons to 2 gallons. This didn’t surprise me, however, the bell siphon operation changed so much, it became almost impossible to adjust, even with brass faucets. Sometime down the road, I will post on bell-siphon and designs involving them. Anyway, I moved away from using a bell siphon in the buckets to a continuous water flow model. I removed the faucets from the feed tube and replaced them with straight barb fittings and black tubing feeding the buckets directly.

Plant growth was really good. It only took six weeks for the tomato plants I got to jump up almost past the top of the frame. It seemed each week we had wonderful growth.

Then the summer months took their toll. 110 degrees each day coupled with no shade for over 8 hours. My plants fainted in the blistering exposure. I ended up pulling the plug on the pump in mid-June.

I was crushed, despondent even. However, my wife Debbi encouraged me to push on. We would figure out a new plan. Clearly, the trough had to be moved to a better spot, so next year (2014), we would start again under the shade of our large Mulberry tree. Epic failure, no, not at all – but a very good learning lesson that in Arizona, you can never discount the sun, no matter how much water you throw at something.

See the post on ‘The Refrigerator’ that shows the resurrection of the system. As of this writing, it is mid-March, 2014. Growing season is in full swing, summer time will be the full test.