So, I remembered to bring the spigots for the pump, this morning. Hooray! I got to the house, did some puttering around, and then started to hook up the hose to the pump, set the pump in the fish tank, and turned it on.
The pump's instructions say to start it at full blast, and then reduce the flow if necessary. Since the pump is rated for a 10 gallon set-up, and mine is 2 gallons, at best, I knew I'd have to reduce. Still, I followed the instructions, and once the flow was flowing, I reduced it to minimum.
The good news is, minimum looks to be the perfect rate of flow. The bad news is, I had to do a lot of fiddling in order to get the pump to push the quantity of water up the hose, so it'll spill into the grow bed. Apparently, the min rate of flow's pressure is too little by about an inch. I reduced the hose length. I cut a notch out of the grow bed's rim. I cut another notch out. I cut a third notch out. This seems to be just barely enough so that the pump, set to minimum flow, will send water, drip by parsimonious drip, into the grow bed.
That was 10 minutes ago. It appears that I might need to put one more notch in the rim, making it that much shorter, in order to get water into the bed. The rate of flow at the second lowest setting on the pump is far too much. I think the only way I could make that work is by putting an inch-wide hole at the other end of the grow bed, and the way things are looking, I might have to do something like that. I just don't have the tools to make an irrigation system that has the overflow bypass the grow bed entirely.
As stupid as this sounds, I probably wouldn't be having these issues if I had a drill with enough oomph to actually drill through the PVC pipe I'd picked up...
Holy schnikey. if I use the leftover length of hose, drill holes in that for draining into the growbed, and set the remaining hose to empty back into the aquarium, that just might work. Time to give it a try!
About an hour later Well, after a lot of tinkering, snipping and expletives, I have something that works, somewhat. I'm going to give it 10 minutes to see if there's more flowing into the growbed than is draining. If so, I'm going to scream in frustration and go to Home Despot for a new solution for the plants and the drainage. And maybe a drill. Our Ryobi is some 15 years old, and the batteries just aren't charging.
Let's have some pictures!
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