How often should i be flushing water through my grow beds?

[Kilowolf]

Hi,

I have built the barrel ponics system in my basement and am now about to begin cycling. Currently while i am running the system i am filling the flush tank and fluching about 17 gallons of water through ever 10 minutes. I feel like that is high and after adding an aerator off the pump line back into the fish tank and slowing the flow of the pump it is flushing closer to every 23 minutes. The pump i am using is a 300gph going up about 6 feet.

Is there any hard rule on how often you should flush wather through the grow beds? The book i read said the entire contents of the tank every hour. So the 17 gallons every 23 minutes is currently doing that (about 50 gallons in the system)

I plan on having worms in the system if that makes any difference.

[Ravnis]

IMO, faster rates are better, the trade off is increased energy use. I had used a 6000 gph pump on a 1000 gallon system and it worked very well. I haven't kept up with the math, but nitrification rates are faster with increased pumping speeds to a degree. The larger pump will allow you room for expansion when the AP bug bites.

[Kilowolf]

cool thanks for the reply.