Success..mostly

Today to release some stress from the toils of life in IT I swore I was going to go home and work on the grow bed and fix the issues and test.  I asked my assistant Conor if he would join me in the backyard and we began.  I had already re-sized the bulkhead adapter gasket and used silicone on the the cap to the bell on the siphon.  We also made a new down spout to increase the velocity of the downward flow and pull on the siphon.  The thought is that this will prevent a "bubble" from forming at elbow and drifting back to the bell breaking the flow.

Notice the funnel at the top this is to increase the flow volume into the drain.

The sealed bell.

I left the funnel on the tube hoping that it is not the issue.  We also had to place the tank on the ground so that we could use a longer down spout. We had to run a few test, several fills and drains, trying to determine the best rate that the bed would work at.  On our first test it filled in 3 minutes and drained in 90 seconds, but the siphon would not stop so the drain and fill were stuck at a 1/4" deep.  We decreased the fill rate a bit and it now filled in 9 minutes and drained at 2:06.  The drain hung for a bit but finally got the gurgle of air.  After a few more tweak we had the fill to 23 minutes and drain in 1:20 seconds, I thinks this probably the best we can do with this bed without increasing the size of the drain to 1".  We also tested the down spout on the slower fill fast drain rate, the be filled but would never go full drain, just a trickle to keep it from over-flowing.

I do still have to clean the hydrocorn and make the media filter but we are very close to starting the active flood and drain and add fish. Really need to locate a metal rack for the tank and bed.  I think the plastic one we have will collapse.  Hopefully we can get some type of setup running this weekend.

We will keep you all posted and thanks for reading.