Building a HUGE Pond Filter - Part 6 - Shower Filters

You may or may not be able to hear the sound of running water everywhere and that means I've got the shower filters going. So in this episode we're going to be taking a look in there and I may have to switch some of these pumps and flowing water off just so we can hear ourselves think. Now you might remember from a previous episode of this series that the pump that was in the pond was a It was a 12,000 litre an hour Blagdon Amphibious IQ pump. That one is now sitting in the container underneath me here, powering these two shower filters. And what that means is that the main filter is actually being powered by a big pump. I'm going to go into that one in the next video and show you everything when it's complete. But in this video, we're going to be concentrating on the showers. They're already set up so I'm not going to run through the setup, I've done videos on that previously. I'm basically going to explain what they are, show you the pump, show you what I've got in them and then go on to tell you about the reason why I'm using the showers and why I'm using the media. What I'm intending to achieve by doing that. And I'm going to turn the pump off because when I've got all that noise behind me it's very off-putting. Now before I actually knock the pump off, and explain what's going on. I'll just remind you that this is an infinitely adjustable one so at the moment it's 85 watts. That's pumping 12,000 liters an hour and I can knock it all the way down to next to nothing. However I'm going to put it all the way up like that and then I'm simply going to pause it like that. And by pausing the pump it not only makes it a little bit quieter but it stops it That's it, from pumping the water out of this container. Through this Oase controllable Y piece. with taps on and therefore it stops it going up to the showers and making all that noise. Now this controllable Y-piece is an excellent fitting. I used to use it all the time when I was putting ponds in many years ago and it's good to see that Oase are still making them because that's a very useful fitting. It doesn't shut the flow off completely. But it controls it, so because I've got showers of different heights, it allows me to get the flow between them absolutely perfect, very, very easily. And I've used reinforced pipe throughout, all the joints are taped, and they are all clipped. Again, I've showed that in previous videos, no need to run through that, but it bears mentioning that everything is connected up very securely to prevent any leaks. Okay, that's our pump. I did run through that in a previous video, which I will put the link to in the video description and in the pinned comment. Basically, this is a really nice electronically adjustable pond pump that is just big enough to power both of these big shower filters. I think if I had the next size down, it wouldn't be big enough. So that fella just sits in the bottom of this container with a big bag of grog over the top. And these showers look very different but they basically do exactly the same job. We've got one here from Global Koi which is the stainless steel shower filter. Again I have set that up in a previous video when it was running on my pond. That is big, it's probably about a meter maybe four foot long, four tier, so it holds an absolutely incredible amount of media. And then this little fella here, Is roughly the same width, I think it's probably about four foot as well, either a meter or four foot. And that's Evolve Shower Filter. And that one's made of like a hardened plastic, it's like plastic welded. And it's actually a lot easier to pull apart that one with it being plastic. It's basically a series of troughs with a lid on. I know a lot of people do like the stainless steel look. Basically, it doesn't matter which one you go for, they do the same job, you know. Although this one does have more room for potential gassing off which I know a lot of people worry about. I personally don't worry about it because this space is any amount for gas to get out or get in you know. I mean people worried about gassing off of shower filters just don't worry about it. They're both fed in exactly the same way through a spray bar and that extends It extends the full length of the top tree and it showers water in through the various Types of media. Ultimately pouring it out down the bottom here onto about 250 kilos of alpha grog. I didn't want to waste this space. So that trough there, although it doesn't look very deep, it's actually buried in the ground quite a lot. That's actually a meter deep or is it four foot? I cannot It's deep. It's certainly deeper than waist deep because I was in there not so long ago. And it is a deep trough full of crates of alpha grog just because. So in the Evolve one, I've actually put a fine pad in here just to get any fine muck that makes its way through the filter. And there has been a lot of fine muck make its way through the filter because I've been fannying on with the earlier parts of the filter and also the moving bed and so on. So it's caught a lot of the muck. Underneath that, Oh, you can't really see, but we've got a mixture of this sort of stuff, which is white pumice. There's also bio-home of various types in there. There might even be a little bit of alpha grog. There's all sorts in there. I basically just filled that up months ago with pretty much anything I had lying around. But the setup for that one is very different, because I didn't have this one running at the time when I made my big filter, so it was actually empty. And in an act of pure putting my money where my mouth is, you can see what I've filled that one up with, it's actually got three different types of the Biohome media. It's got the shower balls, which are extremely hard. They're mostly on the top, just to take any fallen water. We've also got the large red sticks, which are Biohome Maxi Ultimate. And we've also got the large grey sticks, which are Biohome Ultra. Basically that stuff all does the same job which supports a colony of bacteria, both aerobic and anaerobic. And when I switch these filters back on you'll be able to see that the flow going through them is quite gentle but it covers absolutely every piece of every tray. All the media is covered with fallen water and that's exactly what you want. So let's switch it back on. You'll be able to see it start up gradually so it doesn't damage the impeller. That's a nice feature. And we'll give this a minute or two just to start flowing properly, and then I'll get back to you. Right, so I've just had a phone call, which was the perfect length to allow this to fill back up again. And you can see we've got a reasonable flow coming over both of these weirs here. More difficult to see what's happening in here than it is in here, but hopefully you'll be able to see the water just dribbling all the way along here, and also along here. It's basically covering all the media. And if anybody's interested in any of this media, I did a video called Looking Inside Filter Media, which is very important, so I'll put a link to that in the video description. That explains exactly how this works, and it should hopefully make you realise exactly why I'm using so much of it in here, because I want the water coming out of this filter to be perfect. Just to show you what's going on in the top of the stainless steel filter. This is the only place in this filter where I've used alpha grog. And what I've used it in the top of there for is because it is exceptionally hard. It's not much good at supporting anaerobic bacteria, but it does support aerobic bacteria. So we've got some bacterial action happening there. And this stuff, with it being very hard, it ensures that we don't get any wear on the media that's underneath here, which is the biofilm of various types. This spreads the flow. so that we get good coverage and all the good media underneath here and all in the next chambers gets properly covered with water that's what we're after good coverage now one thing that i've seen mentioned in a few videos that people have put out about filtration is the issue of tracking and what that is when the water comes in at the top finds the easiest way and just goes down one side Of the filter missing out 90% of the media. Now that tends to happen when the media isn't good, when it isn't porous. Because good porous media actually draws the water right the way along itself and it distributes it a lot better than say ceramic rings, ceramic tubes that don't draw the water in as much as some of this stuff. If you are using ceramic stuff, you can prevent tracking by simply putting a grid halfway up here. Just a plastic grid, so the water lands on it, travels along the grid, and then flows down and covers all of your ceramic media. As I say, when you use good porous media, the sintered glass in here, tracking isn't an issue. As you've seen, the water is distributed all over the place. If I was using big ceramic tubes in here, I would put a grid halfway up. each one of these sections just to make sure that the water was distributed properly. The main reason I'm using such a lot of good media in these showers is because I want to tackle the nitrate that is the end process of the other parts of my filter. Now the moving bed part of this filter way back is only good for the aerobic side of filtration, which is the removal of ammonia and nitrite. It won't do anything with nitrate. Basically, if your filter is only a moving bed, it is a nitrate factory. You need something after that to tackle the nitrate. So after the moving bed in our filter, we've got two huge beds of alpha grog, which is packed into crates. It's a very cheap media. Most of its surface area is external, so in itself... It's not good for anaerobic bacteria but by packing it into the crates and having the flow distributed very evenly through the filter we do create dead zones between each piece of media encouraging anaerobic bacteria to live there hopefully doing something with the nitrate but this will be the main nitrate removal part of our system. Okay so in our last static bed I've actually bent this outlet down. and that's created a whirlpool which sucks a lot of air in here so when that drops down and goes under the ground and up and into our shower reservoir that goes all the way to the bottom and then it's got a 90 degree bend so it actually fires the water around and around and around in here so it stays in here a long time and hopefully underneath there you'll be able to see all the bubbles coming up Under here, that's actually from the air that's coming up being dragged in next to the water and bubbling up in here. So in here it's quite oxygenated. Obviously these showers in themselves are quite oxygenated as well but the deoxygenation zones where the nitrate's reduced is inside the media. That's the important thing, it's inside the media. The type of filter isn't too important, the type of filter media is critical. Okay that's our controllable Y piece there and I've basically just cable tied it to here. I've cable tied the pipe on here just to keep everything nice and neat and I've cable tied it where it goes over the top as well so everything's pretty secure you know. Well I've got a bit of a loop in here but it's out of the way you're not going to trip over it because that's about eight inches above where your feet would be. And where the water comes It comes out of this big shower container, again it drops down, draws air in with it. And then it spits it out to my pond. There's actually a four-inch pipe going out here, firing the water that way. And you can see all the air bubbling up there. So in a few weeks, when the pond clears, you'll probably see a lot of trout hanging around underneath here. And really, you can see the issues that I'm having with this big platform. That's starting to rot. These are rotten. It's only a matter of time before I actually fall through there. I did fall through there. So what I'm going to do is rip all of this up, take this fence down, and put big plastic crates. At water level and actually plant all of that up with Norfolk reed so the outlet will come out here and I'll actually divert it that way so it'll go through the roots of all the Norfolk reed this will function as a massive reed bed. And that will be unbelievably good for fry and also for the fish. So the big pump's in. That's a huge two-inch flexible pipe going all the way into the pond. The pump sits about here. Not quite in the middle, but it's quite a long way out. Sitting in about four to five metres of water. Pumping up into this gigantic filter system. Sometime in the near future, I'm going to put trellis on the front of here and along here with like a trellis gate on here just to hide all of that and just to tidy everything up. But for the most part, that is my filter finished. And in the next video, we'll take a look at the pump that's in the pond. I'll go through in detail what's happening in each section, show you it working completely. And hopefully, we'll see an improvement in the clarity of the pond water. So I'm going to film that part of the video. In maybe three or four weeks. I'm going to give this three or four weeks of running. Just to see what's going on. Just to make sure there's no balls ups. So far nothing has overflowed. Everything's working perfectly. Touch wood. So I'll film that in a few weeks. That could be a video out in a few days. Because my video editing is miles behind. This could have been filmed a month ago. For all I know. The editing takes me ages to get done. So look out for that video then I will compile all the important bits into one manageable video showing the construction of this from beginning to end. Thanks very much for watching check out the links for the gear that I've mentioned in the video description and in the pinned comment and I shall see you next time.