Aquaponics - Self cleaning swirl filter revisited

One of the many people named Anonymous took the time to comment on my self cleaning swirl filter, so I thought I'd revisit the topic with some thoughts I've been having.

For the last few weeks I've been thinking of getting some more fish.

And I've also been thinking about developing the self cleaning swirl filter a little more.

My original design was to tap off a small amount of clean water for NFT tubes employing the self cleaning filter to keep the roots from collecting solids and blocking the NFT tubes. In the end I got around that by just taking my water from the sump, where there were no solids, but that required a better pump to get water to the top of the tubes. .


If this were ever to be implemented as a system to remove solids from a system rather than returning them to the grow beds it would need some adjustment.

It's easy to set up a container so that it is right at the point of tripping a siphon, but will never actually get there unless someone suddenly dumps water into it. With this in mind, one option I thought of  when I was playing with this idea, was to use a deer scarer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi-odoshi

Set a dripping tap, so it slowly filled a deer scarer. The deer scarer should tip only once or twice a day, and should dump the same amount of water that the self cleaning swirl filter takes from the system each time it's triggered.

I'm going to build a deer scarer, and see how it works, then see if it really would take care of dosing the self cleaning filter with the correct amount of water to make it do it's thing.

You can see my previous work on my self cleaning swirl filter here.