 Greetings friends! This is Survival Doc. Today we're going to make an Aquaponics Garden. I'm starting with the 60 gallon aquarium setup. Now if you've been watching my videos and if you know me, you know that I'm cheat or I should say I'm frugal. I wouldn't buy something like this new as far too expensive. This is something that I picked up at an estate sale. Now this 60 gallon aquarium was on top of the stand but to make my aquaponics unit what I did was I moved the aquarium from the top of the stand to the bottom shelf and the top of the stand will make a nice platform for my planter. This is what I decided to go with. I took one of my rain barrels and I cut it in half. Now the rain barrel is a little bit short but this does allow room for me to get into the aquarium to feed the fish and to take care of the fish and I just took my rain barrel and cut it in half lengthways. Alright if you do this sort of thing what you want to make sure that you do is that you get a food grade barrel. Some of these barrels had toxic chemicals stored in them. You want to know where your barrel came from. This barrel had a label on it. A lot of them come with labels on it and the label said it was artificial peach flavoring which means it was used and I believe it was used in a bottling a soda bottling company and they purchased their ingredients in these large barrels and they mixed them together to make their sodas. So even though artificial peach flavor is not something I would particularly care to put into my body still it is a food grade. It is not toxic. Now I'm going to show you how I cut the barrel in half. Before I did this I did a search on YouTube and I didn't find any really good videos on how to do this. So I decided I'm going to add that part to my video and how to cut a barrel in half. By cutting a barrel in half you end up with two planters. Alright I wanted the bung hole at the bottom here rather than having it up here somewhere. Now the trick is to find a half way point to cut your barrel exactly in half. Now these barrels have a seam one on each side. This is where the barrel is put together. Now you could slice your barrel in half using that seam but as you would see it goes right through your bung holes. So the way that I found the center is I measured from this seam around the barrel to the other seam, found that measurement, divided it in half and measured that distance from the seam to the side of the barrel and marked it. Then the same thing over here took my straight edge and drew the line down each side then extended that line across the top and voila. Now I cut this barrel with my circular saw and it cut it cut just perfectly fine with my circular saw here. I will warn you a lot of people have this type of blade on your circular saw. It has a larger teeth with the carbide teeth on it. This blade is great for cutting wood for cutting your barrel. You would do a lot better if you use this type of blade with the small tooth. This blade is designed to cut things like paneling where you don't splinter their wood real bad and I just found it cut the barrel just perfectly easily. Alright once I cut the barrel in half then I just took some sandpaper just kind of smooth down the edges and using that blade the edges were fairly smooth but I took a little sandpaper and smoothed it down the rest of the way. You want to make sure that your plug is in here real tight because when you fill this with water you don't want water dripping out of here. Okay my next step was to put the automatic siphon unit in here. Alright I want to find I turn the barrel over I want to find the middle of the barrel in this case we can use the seam that will be the exact middle of the bottom of the barrel. So measure the distance across here divided it in half to get the center point. Alright this seam doesn't show up on the other side of the barrel very well so I'm going to drill a pilot hole through here from this side then I'm going to use my I guess it's called a hole saw I think is what this is called put this on the end of my electric drill and I'm going to drill a hole this size because that is the size that I need for my bulkhead adapter. Once I get the hole drilled I will stick the bulkhead adapter through this gasket goes on the outside this part screws on the other side reverse thread here and then I'll put an adapter here to put my PVC pipe on. Here is the adapter this will screw right into this on the inside of the barrel and this adapters three-quarter inch allows my three-quarter inch PVC pipe to plug into it and I'll tighten this down of course and we'll go over the siphon pump a little bit later. Okay I've got my bulkhead adapter screwed in now the rubber gasket on the outside as the instructions say this part screwed in very tightly on the inside and this thing is threaded for this PVC adapter and I'm screw this in here and then I can put my three-quarter inch PVC pipe in here. Okay this pipe is going to be my siphon pipe so I want the top of this pipe the top of this pipe is going to determine the water level when this fills up I want the water level to be about one and a half to two inches from the top here I'd say two inches I'm gonna go two inches from the top here and so that's where I want to cut this pipe off so I'm going to make a mark here this would be the very top of the container and then I'm going to measure two inches below that mark and that's where I'm going to cut it off and then that way it'll maintain the water level at two inches beneath the edge. Okay I decided to actually cut off three inches of this pipe so that the top of this pipe would be three inches from the edge of the planter here and the reason for that is I decided to want an inch of space here above the gravel level so the gravel isn't knocked out of the planter so we have an inch there then gravel begins and then we have two inches of gravel to the water level. Okay for the next part of the siphon I have some one and one half inch PVC pipe and it's going to fit over this pipe like so and I'm going to cut this pipe to where the top is about the same as the top of this one and then I'm going to put this cap on the top of this part which will fit over there like this and I'll explain how that works once we get this done. Okay this is how the siphon works as the water level increases here inside this pipe the water begins to pour inside the drain pipe but we have this cap on this part to create the siphon as the water begins to fall down through this pipe it creates a siphon because of this cap on here and it pulls water up from the bottom and it drains the water all the way to here. Alright then here once the water level reaches here the siphon is broken it begins to fill again from the water pump and it starts to cycle all over siphons drains to here fills up drains to here fills up drains here because you don't want the roots of your plants to be continuously soaked in water they'll get waterlogged for most plants that's not good for them the plants need air so what this does is it allows some water time for the roots and some air time for the roots. Now to make sure there's good flow down here at the bottom of this thing that nothing clogs that up I'm going to just cut a few slits here in the bottom just to allow water to easily flow through here okay I just cut a couple of slits and a couple of notches in the bottom of that so that the water would flow in freely and this basically is the automatic siphon the only part left is this here that goes on the outside like this and this is simply and I'll cut this off level with the top of the plant to here and this is left open at the top and this is simply to keep gravel out of this system here so that the water can flow up freely into the siphon so I'll just measure the top of my container here on this pipe and then just cut this pipe off level or just slightly above perhaps with the edge of the planter and there you have it there's the siphon pump as far as the inside is concerned and what's left the bottom side where I will just put another three-quarter inch adapter in here and I cut a short piece of pipe here for the drain and the reason that I want this piece of pipe here is because the longer that pipe is here the better suction you'll get when the water starts falling through it has further to fall through to create a better suction to create and maintain the siphon and there we have the completed unit all we have to do is add our lava rock or our gravel fill the system with water put our fish down here in the aquarium we'll put a water pump in the aquarium here with a hose from the water pump coming up pouring water into here this will fill up with water to this point water will start pouring in here where it will drain back down into the fish tank and with this on it as the water starts pouring in here it'll create a vacuum which will create a suction which will create a siphon and the siphon will drain the tank all the way down to here all right here air will enter the siphon which will break the siphon well I hooked up my system and filled it with water and I tested it and found out that my siphon doesn't work and the problem is of course this pipe here where the water falls through is not long enough the way a siphon works is the weight and the suction from the water falling through the pipe is what pulls the water up the other pipe on the other side and apparently this piece of pipe here is not long enough the problem of course is my aquarium is right beneath this so what my solution is going to be is I bought some of these elbows and I'm going to come off of here and make a longer pipe sort of a stair step type to extend the length of this pipe but going around like this and we'll see how that works okay here's my solution to the siphon problem as you can see I extended the length of this siphon hose and to deal with the space limitations I curved it and I have each section is sloping slightly downward to use gravity of course siphon works by gravity and the weight of water flowing through the pipe so this is downhill once I turn this over again this is the bottom that we're looking at okay we'll see how this works okay we have the water in the aquarium we have the water pump running the water is flowing filling the planter we'll get the siphon ready to work and I did end up cutting some slits in the bottom of this to make sure that we had good water flow so all we have to do now is wait for the water to fill the tank and see if the siphon starts working one other thing while we're waiting for that I'll mention is you'll notice that I'm using a blue barrel here now I have white barrels and I have blue barrels and the problem with the white barrels is it lets light shine through and what you'll end up with is you'll end up with algae growing inside this planter in other words algae will start growing on the rocks in here and you don't really want that you can see here the white plastic how the light how the light shines through the white plastic but it doesn't sound through the dark plastic for a planter like this I see a lot of people using the white plastic barrels and they'll work I'm sure but if you have the darker barrels such as this blue one here it actually work out better because of that reason okay I have a 140 gallon per hour pump running here and it took about 20 25 minutes to fill this of course it won't take as long once I get gravel in here according to my calculations the siphon should kick on at about three inches so we got a little bit to go here about another inch to go when that water level gets up to the top of that dome there the siphon should be kicking on okay it's almost at three inches water is almost there should start draining in just a minute and there she goes the siphon is working and it's draining well I finally got my siphon to where it would start okay every time and then I ran into the problem of getting the siphon to stop or getting the siphon to break what would happen is it would just reach an equilibrium where the water inflow was the same as the water outflow so I did a little research looked at some more YouTube videos and this is an idea that I found I drilled a hole in my cap here inserted an elbow and a piece of tubing so that when the water level falls down to here it'll break that suction also another thing you can do is take a little medicine bottle like this if you need to and put this in here so that when the water drains down it just has to suck the water out of this bottle here before it breaks the suction and then you can also trim this off if you need to adjust this trim the bottle here I don't know if this part is necessary but I've got that ready to stand by but anywhere I thought this is a pretty good idea so we'll give that a try the other thing that I learned was that this drainage system down here the siphon system does not need to be at such a sharp angle downward just an ever so slight incline helps us the suction work better if it's too much of an incline then the water doesn't create a good suction because the pipe doesn't fill with water the water flows out of the pipe too quickly and the pipe doesn't feel which which is required for the suction to be created it starts to siphon so I adjusted these pipes fortunately I didn't glue them together I just fitted them together so I could make adjustments to it but it is these ever so slight incline to get that siphon to work and perhaps no incline at all it probably would work just fine if it was level with no incline the siphon might actually start quicker if I did that but it's working now now we need to fill fill it with the pea gravel plants give my fish put my light system up and we'll be ready to start growing I'm using the clay pebbles at first I used the pea gravel and I found that the pea gravel was so heavy that I was afraid my system was going to be too heavy for my aquarium stand here so instead of using the pea gravel I went out and got some clay pebbles very very very very lightweight compared to the gravel the problem with these is they float and as the water rises the pebbles rise and as the water settles the pebble pebbles settle and it's disrupted to the roots of the plant so my solution was to put the plants in these pots here so even though the pots will shift around at least the roots won't be disturbed so much now the floating pebbles are still a problem because as the as the pebbles move around these pots tend to shift and lean over and I would not recommend floating pebbles I have a source now for clay pebbles that are supposed to not be floating and I'm going to get some of those and replace these pebbles eventually with the clay pebbles that don't float so if you are going to use a system like this where you have the water that rises and settles and rises and settles I would not recommend the floating pebbles I would use something that does not float you can see I installed my lighting system I'm using three of the four-foot shop lights I put LED light bulbs in here to cut back on electricity usage and put it on a timer so now we're fully operational this is survival dock reminding you be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced