[heady blunts]

scrap that thing is pretty sweet. i love the mounting situation.

yea like mm said, it's not gonna run with 2 gals in a 10 gal brewer. i recommend on my itty bitty one that the spout is positioned 2"-3" from the water surface. this means that the top of the lift is less than 6" from the water surface.

it takes a lot of energy to move water up, so the less distance above the water level you make it travel, the less force you're losing, and the better your flow will be.

[RipVanWeed]

I've found that if I run the lift more than 2" above the water level the splash out is excessive.

MicrobeMan (Thanks) relieved my concern regarding minimum waterfall distance, originally I tried to keep the drop over 4".

Even at 2" the flow back into the bucket is vigorous.

Respect,

[Scrappy4]

Thanks Heady blunts, as you can see, I borrowed from other posters previous designs and MM's web page. Thanks to all.

Actually it does run with only two gallons of tea in it, although that would close to the minimum, at one gallon the return line drips and spits a little, two gallons maintains a flow, and the flow increases as the volume goes up. I only tested up to 5 gallons because my outside water is still not hooked up yet because we still are getting below freezing temps in my neck of the woods. So 5 gallons is all I hauled for this test. I ran it 24 hours with two gallons of tea, it did foam up nice, but I doubt the tea was very biologically active due to our low temps. I poured it on my compost pile. I did have some build up of mud on the bottom of the tank. The "cone" is more like a pyramid and has a flat spot on the bottom, so that gets a little build up, but I doubt it is enough to worry about. When set up as an air dump, there is not much agitation, when it is run as a bubbler style, it agitates real well. I wish I had a meter to check the dissolved O2 each way......scrappy

Edit although it's tuff to see in my pics the upriser is reduced from 11/4 to 1 inch. This helped get better flow.

[thatgreenstuff]

Well here is my first attempt at an airlift design. Its pretty much an exact copy of headies. Im brewing about 3.5 gallons . I found a pump today for 22 bucks at a pet store. It says up to 150 gallon tanks. I found out when i open the manual that it is only 11 lpm. Unless they mean 11lpm per outlet which i doubt. I have an extra dual pump sitting around maybe i could throw to airstones in the 5 gallon jug as well if that pump isnt enough. Let me know what you guys think. If I have to just get a 50 lpm pump at the hydro store i will but ide rather save the 40 bucks if I can. I cant really tell if the lift is getting enough pressure or not.

[thatgreenstuff]

Ok so i changed things around a bit from my last post. First I added the general hydro pump which is 20lpm but with the current 1/2 piping it was really loud water splashing, so I changed from a 1/2 pipe to a 1 & 1/2 pipe. I also changed the hoses and how they enter the up lift. Before I had the hoses for aquariums from like petco and had them doing a u turn via rubber band into the up lift pipe. I bought some water pipe from lowes which is much stronger and sturdier. When i tried to bend it like how headiez has it they pinch up so I instead drilled holes and just have them going in horizontally. This should be ok yea? i included a picture to help illustrate. Everything looks like its working good now. What do you guys think, will she make good tea? ( i know it depends on the compost ) wich brings me to one extra question >< is eb stone ewc, and eb stone organic compost good enough to make a healthy and active act.

[heady blunts]

Originally Posted by thatgreenstuff

Ok so i changed things around a bit from my last post. First I added the general hydro pump which is 20lpm but with the current 1/2 piping it was really loud water splashing, so I changed from a 1/2 pipe to a 1 & 1/2 pipe. I also changed the hoses and how they enter the up lift. Before I had the hoses for aquariums from like petco and had them doing a u turn via rubber band into the up lift pipe. I bought some water pipe from lowes which is much stronger and sturdier. When i tried to bend it like how headiez has it they pinch up so I instead drilled holes and just have them going in horizontally. This should be ok yea? i included a picture to help illustrate. Everything looks like its working good now. What do you guys think, will she make good tea? ( i know it depends on the compost ) wich brings me to one extra question >< is eb stone ewc, and eb stone organic compost good enough to make a healthy and active act.

very clean! congrats your new brewer!

[Truthbesaid]

my little 5 min brewer. my airstones broke so i set this up.. even with the slow flow rate its got more foam than with just the airstones(that pic was as soon as i added stuff) now woud it work better with a full U spout? just used pipes i had already so i plan on going to grab more tomorrow.

[Scrappy4]

Originally Posted by Scrappy4

Still a work in progress, but I'm getting closer.

I'm using an eco air 3 commercial pump. It is rated at 65 liters per minute, I would not go any smaller for an air lift design as it is barely enough to force the tea up and over.

But just the pump and diffuser in the tank without the air lift return up riser agitates better than the air lift, but i have no way to measure dissolved O2 difference each way.

The tank came with threaded nuts embedded on one side of the tank, so I screwed the tank to the plywood, then U bolted the plywood to the cart.

The bottom pic shows the homemade diffuser. It is simply a piece of pvc that has been plugged and jammed into the female end of the barbed fitting, and is inside of the return up-riser. It has tiny holes drilled on an angle to force the air up......scrappy










Diffuser:

My homemade brewer experiment goes on. I've found that the up riser pipe gets clogged with organic matter after a while. The up riser pipe is only a one inch pvc pipe so with the diffuser in place (1/2 inch) there is not much room for large particles to get by the diffuser, so they clog there. Rather than bag up my compost I eliminated the up-riser completely and still use the diffuser but it is right on the tank bottom. The agitation is much better this way, although dissolved O2 comparisons are unknown.

I've now made a half dozen 7 gallon teas in this 10 gallon brewer. I've cut it by 1/2 to 2/3 with rain water. Most of the brews are just homemade compost, alfalfa, molasses and rain water. (i'm low on homemade ewc at the moment) In this short time my indoor plants seem to love the tea, in fact that is all they have had other than water throughout veg, I've never had better veg growth in fact, and outdoors in the flower garden the plants love it. I did not glue anything, so it comes apart easy for cleaning between brews, and so far it seems to hold together.

And the difference from my old brews in a 5 gallon bucket and this brewer is huge, I'm kind of shocked actually, how well it works.....scrappy

[Bullfrog44]

I am trying to make my own compost tea brewer as well. I am trying to figure out what size container to buy, but I don't know how much tea is made with each batch. For example, if I buy a five gal bucket, does that make 5 gal of feed? Or is that concentrated and makes more like 15 gal of feed? Any info would be great, sorry if missed earlier in the thread.

Edit: I know you can't fill container to the top because of overflow, just wondering if the tea is concentrated.

[Bullfrog44]

Bump:

I also figured I will be using about 25 gal an application. Any suggestions on what size container or air pump?