hi all so what is the difference between a shower,and a trickle tower.what is the best media for both.lets no include bhm.
Sam,
There is a clear distinction between trickle towers and showers and it's all to do with the bugs that colonise them. It gets a bit technical so I'll skate quickly over some of the some of the points. Ask if you are sad enough to want more details.
If you grossly over-simplify the bug world, you could say that there are three types of bug. Sorry about the names, but if you want to understand the differences between trickle towers, showers and which media does best in them, you have to understand this before I can go on:
Obligate aerobic bugs: An easy way to remember this is that they are
obliged to live aerobically (plenty of oxygen).
Obligate anaerobic bugs:
Obliged to live anaerobically (no oxygen).
Facultative anaerobic bugs: Easiest way; they are aerobic but they have the
facility to live anaerobically if they can steal some oxygen from somewhere.
In conventional nitrogen cycle filtration, both bugs (nitrosomonas and nitrobacter) are obligate aerobic. They need lots of oxygen which is why Jap-mat with a few airstones or bubbly cauldrons of K1 are good conventional media.
In a true trickle tower, there is a sealed container, usually a long vertical tube, full of media. Any old media will do as long as it's a solid surface. The only way oxygen can get inside is in the water that goes in at the top. As long as there is only a trickle through this tower of media (geddit?) there will be very little oxygen for the bugs inside it. Obligate aerobic chaps like our nitrogen cycle bugs will gasp their last and peg out. There will be just a little bit too much oxygen for obligate anaerobic bugs to be very happy so the only bugs that do well inside here are the facultative anaerobes. Nitrate is NO
3 which is one nitrogen and 3 oxygen atoms so these thieving little sods steal the oxygen which only leaves nitrogen. In other words, what they do is to take any nitrate in the water that goes in and convert it to nitrogen gas which just bubbles away as soon as the water trickles out. Trickle towers reduce nitrate levels in pond water.
Showers; These are usually trays of media stacked vertically so that a good flow of water tumbles down over them, becoming highly aerated as it goes.
Bakki showers are very good, so is BHM but they are sold with great big dollops of BS. I'm not anti Bakkis or anti BHM, I'm anti BS. For example, I read, ".... and the breeder was looking at the way water in a mountain stream trickled down over the rocks.... to imitate it, he invented the shower and BHM....." Very poetic BS but BS just the same. There is no similarity between the rocks in mountain streams and a shower full of BHM. A bog standard waterfall is a nearer equivalent, and as for the magic rays that BHM puts into the water - Please!!!!
So with that rant out of the way, Bakkis and BHM are very good but this is the way they really work. The diagram is from an article I wrote for Koi magazine on ways to reduce nitrate and I have reproduced it on my website.
http://www.mankysanke.co.uk/html/reducing_nitrate.html
There's a longer and better description in it but, briefly, this is how denitrifying media such as porous ceramic media or BHM works.
If you imagine a microscopic hole drilled into a piece of media, the red bugs could get all the oxygen they need from the water. Obligate anaerobic bugs would love it here. The blue bugs would have to make do with what was left but obligate anaerobes could survive here too. The mauve bugs would find that all the oxygen had already been used by their neighbours. Only facultative anaerobic bugs could live this deep and, (just like in a trickle tower), they could survive by stealing oxygen from nitrate in the water. All denitrifying media is, is a place where nitrogen cycle bugs can do there business on the outside of the media and facultative bugs can get rid of nitrate deep inside the holes.
Manufacturers don't drill tiny holes in media to turn it into denitrifying media, they make it porous like the honeycomb in Maltesers or they make a glass/ceramic media and overheat it to make it full of microscopic cracks. Nitrogen cycle bugs can live on the outside and facultative bugs live in the pores or cracks where oxygen cannot penetrate. Trickling mountain streams and magic rays don't come into it.
Combine that with putting trays of denitrifying media in a Bakki shower and there is the aerating effect of a waterfall too. Simple ain't it?
So which media should you put in a shower? BHM might be the most efficient denitrifier but I can't penetrate the marketing hype and get anyone to give me any detailed information about it so I can only say that it might be the most efficient. If you want a cheaper alternative, other denitrifiers such as Alphagrog, any of the porous ceramic media or even my current favourite, Lytag will also perform pretty well in a shower. I like K1 and Jap-mat but they are conventional media so they won't reduce nitrate, even if you use them in a shower.
