njin9
Koi Lover
Jan 22, 2008, 3:24 AM
Post #5 of 17
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Re: [goldy] Brushes vs. Static k1
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Jon, I know what you're talking about.
But I don't plan on cleaning all three drums at once. I just plan on backflushing one drum once a week. The the next week, do the 2nd drum. And the following week do the 3rd. This is a recurring cycle.
This is just to remove settlement at the bottom. I simply close off the input pipe. Swoosh the static K1 around and give it time to let settlements that the K1 had trapped to settle to the bottom. Then open up the reverse BD to fill 2-4 5gallon buckets worth of filtered/settled scum water. Then water the garden with this fertilized water. Open the input pipe again and let the drum continue to do it's settling job.
Consider this part of a routine water change. 2-4 5gallon buckets is 10-20 gallons. This is very little compared to the 120gallons I expect I will need to do when the kois are bigger and mature. I also expect to lose water to evaporating, and hopefully not too much to sprays and splashes. I guess I will see how much water I actually use by how much 5gallon buckets I fill. This is all arbitrary because I can stop whenever I deemed the drum is 'clean enough'. Let's see how lazy I get. I'm considering putting in water lettuce into the first 3 drums with the static K1 to help mechanically filter out tiny particles. Water lettuce has roots that will trap them. The lettuce will also grow, thereby using and removing N compounds and organic matter. It's easy to pick and pluck yellow leaves before they decay. The only problem, is the filters are heavily shaded, which makes giving light to the plants harder. They might grow lanky and pale instead of deep green and bushy. Plus being in my filters, the lettuce will be safe from kois which like to bite and eat them. Also the lettuce will add to the bio-filter capacity, despite being in a mechanical filtering zone. Now I have to figure out how to protect my water lilies.
I think I need 3 settlement tanks(3x55gallon drums) b/c I don't have a large capacity, big diameter vortex tank. vortex filter is it worth the ringgit?
Good article if you get the chance to read it. For the record, I had my filters done, but this article explains it very well, and just confirms what I had thought.
If I wanted to pump more water, then I can add more parallel settlement drums along with the 3 that I do have. I don't want to add more flow rate per drum because crud won't settle. Even if static K1, too much flow rate will start rotating the media inside the drum. This will eventually let crude enter the pipes and move on to drum4. The only problem with adding more drums to this filtering system is the pipe capacity. Right now I have only 2' fittings and pipes hooked up. I don't know what the capacity of 2' pipes are (gravity fed). Hopefully I'm just below that. Otherwise I have an overflow problem. Luckily for me, I have presence of mine to build in overflow pipes. Will have to wait till spring to find out for sure. Much easier and better to build a separate secondary filter elsewhere. That's my intention once I join the two ponds.
As much as I want to sink the drums into the ground to make it gravity fed, I can't because of the pipework. I won't be able to get access to the filters if they(top of drums) are flushed at ground level. There's not enough physical space to dig around them (like a trench) so that I may do maintenance work around them. This will limit me to using pond vacuums to clean out my filters. But hooking up the pipes(down-up + overflow) will be a nightmare in such tight quarters. Plus have to do earth retaining walls (3') and reinforcement. Seems like a lot of work to get some more water flow and less head loss. Sinking it down lower (into the ground, but not flushed) will pose the same problems. I want to do a gravity fed system, but will have to think up of a very creative way to do so for the second filter.
Trickle towers are built. Trying to think up of the best possible place to mount them and get filtered water so I don't have to clean it all season long(spring - autumn). Ideally I want to mount this for the 1200gallon pond, where the kois are kept. TT will aerate and degas N compounds, thereby lowering it. Been thinking to getting a 250gph pump to pump water to the TT from drum 4. This will hopefully remove the 'overflow' factor out of this drum which is collecting 3x 250gph from the first 3 drums. Don't think 2x2" pipes is good enough. The 250gph pump will have to deal with 2.5'-3' head loss which should take make it about 150-175gph? if I use a smaller diameter pipe to get more pressure. Even if it's 100gph, that would be fine for 6xTT. More trickle. Less splash and water loss.
Your opinions would be great,
Do
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Short-term intense, (obsessive) hard work to long-term laziness.
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I'm not going to even consider a direct pond to TT. It's not a BS. Plus BS are loud. Too loud for my liking. 
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