Simply Koi and More Koi

Hi all.
have just got a trickle tower,what is the ideal flow rate?
It has 20kg of bhm in it, how much extra filtration will i get?
What are the pros and cons ?
It is 5ft high and has three tiers.

amanda....
first a question , you say trickle tower or do you mean bakki shower,

a trickle tower is just what it says a flow rate not exceeding 500 gallons an hr ,with the tower allowing air in the sides the ammonionic gasses will dispel to atmosphere = lerss ammonia =less nitrite = less nitrate better oxygenated water.

bakki shower ..flow rates above 500 gallons per hr. the more the better (ask gazza)prefferably over bhm as a media to eat all the poo , some willl say you need a sieve or something to trap the crud first before it passes over the shower media , others will disagree , if you do get that in the top tray then put some sponges in to trap it , result sparkling water no ammonia or any further by product , and most important no maintenance at all , as i have said in a previous post on this is that mike snadden has never turned off or maintained his showers in 20 years ...

the down side , there always is one ......bakki or trickles will cool the water if operated outside a filter house or are not protected from the ravages of winter , but do compliment other filters immensley ....me i like em .. :wink

I install a trickle tower in my previous one koipond. He needed her to eliminate little ammonia, blows of nitrite, and especially nitrate.

It was a big tower:
[img]http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b206/jasg ... CN0631.jpg[/img]
[img]http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b206/jasg ... CN0545.jpg[/img]

The material filtrante was bioballs, separated in trays.

Initially he installs her with 500 galones/h and with the direct water of the reservoir but the bad levels were not reducing.
Later I increased the wealth to 3.000 galones/h. I extracted the water behind the filter and everything changed.
The levels of parameters diminished to the minimum and from this day everything was solved.
Regards.

Hi Ammanda,

TT are great and if you fill it with BHM just whiz the water through i have a Aquamax 16000 on my little TT and it works great.It used to have a Sequence 750 on it so it was much slower and i have never looked in or cleaned it since the pond was built

Hi all.
Thanks for the info.
Gazzer, the tower is insulated and roughly 5ft tall,second hand,but the bhm is what i am pleased with.
I definately need more flow,does yours have an open flow exit like the bakkishowers?
this one has a pipe that the water exits from,Andy set it up for me(bless him). i nearly went into the pond with it when i tried to put it on the ledge on my own the next day! weighs a ton.

Hi Gazza

Are there any issues surrounding air flow re. bakki showers? i.e. if I created a polycarb enclosure to reduce water cooling is there a minimum amount of ventilation required to ensure that there is sufficient O2 available to bacteria to ensure efficient breakdown of waste?

Cheers

Jon W.

Hi Jon,

Sorry to jump in, but I think there will be plenty of oxygen in the water to enable the break down of the waste. The thing that you have to watch out for if you totally enclose the system is pH crashes due to the CO2 build up. My QT is totally enclosed and if I leave the air pump off over night, I have done this accidentally a couple of times, the pH drops from around 8.45 to 8.05. pH is a log scale so that is a big drop overnight!

I now tend to leave a gap in the polycarbonate covering to vent off any CO2 produced.

By the way covering the bacci shower is well worth doing, my very well insulated QT is running around 20C with no heating!

David.

Hi David

That's interesting - I hadn't thought of CO2 venting as being an issue! I have seen a trickle tower system where louvre style vents have been built into the insulating polycarb; I'd assumed this was to increase the amount of O2 available to bacteria.

I'm just about to build a 1000gal QT/growing tank indoors and have been persuaded by this forum that the bakki shower is the way to go. The only thing that gave me pause for thought was the cost of BHM media but having oiled the hinges and stuck some mothballs in it, my wallet is now ready for the shock. I just wanted to be clear in my mind before beginning the build that all design issues have been considered before I begin work.

Cheers

Jon

Hi Jon,

I have just edit my post so that it now reads "8.45 to 8.05" instead of "8.45 to 8.5" which isn't a drop in pH at all! I was very surprise by my pH drop too as i have quite hard water, but when I partially opened the covers and turned on the air the pH went up to 8.25 with in a couple of hours.

My QT was also inspired by Gazza's effort and has a mixture of BHM and alphagrog in it. I was going to run it with only BHM but decided it was going to cost too much. I have a sieve in front of the shower, I don't like the idea of all the cr*p in the system, so if you don't put a sieve in then you can use the money for a few more kg of BHM.

Here is link to a photo of it with the polycarb coverings off, [url=http://picasaweb.google.com/DHo1968/KoiAndF ... 6790461666]QT photo[/url].

Hi Amanda,

My TT has a 2" pipe which comes out of the bottom and then goes back to the pond so its not like a shower.

Hi John,

yes you can indeed cover in your shower as Bob has his insulated on his main pond by covering it with polycarb so it insulates in the winter and is like a mini greenhouse in the summer

Enclosed in poly carb with 1/2" gap at the top on each side. Been running like this for a number of years now with no problems at all.

[img]http://www.koipix.com/gallery/albums/userpi ... %20%20.jpg[/img]

Hi David

I'm beginning to wonder if Gazza is on commision for BHM . He has certainly convinced me of the efficacy of using BHM. In fact I have a some observations he may wish to comment on;

Gazza
I'm still pondering the design for my outside pond to begin in the spring. After reading your comments re Showers I have carefully studied the information on the Yumekoi website re. using Bakki showers as primary filtration. The info suggests that BHM could be pretty much all one needs if the application is built correctly. I'm stongly tempted by this for a number of reasons;

1. I like simple elegant solutions (me being the former but not the latter!)
2. Negligible maintenance
3. Although initial cost of units/BHM is high, my experience with other filtration suggests that after being initially satisfied, most people start to go through cycles of upgrade/tinkering. From my own experience this is cumulatively very expensive.
4. If the anecdotal evidence is true, this provides very good water quality without turning the filter house into a NASA approved water chemistry lab.

The downsides I can see are;
1. Showers really need excellent insulation to counter the ravages of winter.
2. There is less control over flow and direction of water returned to the pond.
3. Pond/landscaping design options would be limited by the need for the filter house to be built very close to the pond.
4. I'm a coward - it feels like I would be putting all my eggs in one basket.

Would you ever rely on a Bakki only filtration system or is the Yumekoi marketing blurb in the same vein as EA "Nexus Eazy as a one stop solution"?

Cheers

Jon W.

Bob,

Nice bit of polycarb boxing in the shower. I don't remember that the last time I was there, so it must be a new addition.


Jon,

My bakki showers are inside the filter house and definitely attached to the pond.

Would you ever rely on a Bakki only filtration system

On my main pond I have 300 ltr of airated K1, a BBF1 filter and 50kg of BHM mixed with another 50kg of alfagrog in a bakki shower. So I guess that is a NO!


Amamada,

Sorry to have hijacked your thread as we are getting more and more off topic, maybe we should have started another thread.

Hi Bob

Do you heat your pond? Do you chase the ambient temp or rack it up for growth during the winter? Even with the polycarb do you find that there is some chilling or does the polycarb provide sufficient insulation?

Hi DHO
Is that because you prefer to spread the risk of a filter failure between several types of media and systems or because you feel that BHM alone couldn't do the job?

Cheers

Jon W.

David - It's been like that for years, possible not as clean as it once was though.

Jon - I control the temperature during the Winter to anywhere between 12-15 degrees. I dont heat as it heating to grow the Koi over Wonter though, count afford that. I kept it at 12-degrees last year and the pond and Koi came out of the Winter very well, so I'll do that again this year. Come the Spring I go updards with ambient temperature until it reaches 20, then leave it.