Lets see what's in your stand! mechanical photo's

Troy1015

Banned
MFK Member
Jan 14, 2011
1,126
1,311
164
Seattle
a little something different. I'm still in the process of setting it up, so here are some pix of what I have done.
so the tank is a 450 glass. I'm setting up the sump on the outside of the house. under the tank, I'm running two fx5s as a close loop. half of the space underneath the tank got turned into a doggie house for my golden retriever.
the reason for the sump being setup outside is to reduce the noise inside of the house. also I wanted an aquaphonic system to reduce nitrate and have some plants for aesthetics in the backyard. the sump would also be used as a bench as well. the dimension of it is 16ft long, 27 inch wide, 21 inch tall

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this s awesome Dloks Dloks check this out
 

Troy1015

Banned
MFK Member
Jan 14, 2011
1,126
1,311
164
Seattle
a little something different. I'm still in the process of setting it up, so here are some pix of what I have done.
so the tank is a 450 glass. I'm setting up the sump on the outside of the house. under the tank, I'm running two fx5s as a close loop. half of the space underneath the tank got turned into a doggie house for my golden retriever.
the reason for the sump being setup outside is to reduce the noise inside of the house. also I wanted an aquaphonic system to reduce nitrate and have some plants for aesthetics in the backyard. the sump would also be used as a bench as well. the dimension of it is 16ft long, 27 inch wide, 21 inch tall

View attachment 1203747

View attachment 1203748

View attachment 1203749

View attachment 1203750

View attachment 1203751

View attachment 1203752

View attachment 1203753

View attachment 1203754

this s awesome Dloks Dloks check this out
 

Brian Rodgers

Jack Dempsey
MFK Member
Apr 10, 2016
163
82
36
70
Northern New Mexico
Good morning
The autoimmune disease I'm struggling to get under control has been hitting me hard since Wednesday when I began this project. While I had a great night sleep Thursday and woke at 7:00 AM I wasn't so lucky last night and have been awake since 3:00AM and out off bed since 4:00AM. We have been watching WW11 in HD Color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_in_HD_Colour on Netflix as I am having difficulty moving around. Fascinating history lesson. Anyhow I put that on at 4:00AM until I smelled the coffee pot start brewing and got off the couch, built a fire and came to my desk to try and get my head together.

I've been working on a system to gently remove fish waste from the bottom of our 2600 gallon fish tank. Using a vaned pump would pulverize solids into the pond water making it more difficult to filter out. Instead I use an air-lift pump to get the solids which settle to the bottom up to the filters in our earth-sheltered greenhouse. Most aquaculture systems have the fish tanks above ground level so moving the fish waste out is simply a matter of gravity feeding the fish waste to filtration.
Currently we've got 100 Brook trout in our aquaponics system. This is far more fish than the aquaponics media beds can clean. So we need to have additional filtration in place.
We bought this cone-bottom tank to use as the first mechanical settling filter which will separate out the solids.


3-20-18-Cone-bottom-tank-here-Snore-Still-waiting-on-NPT-tap
The solids will settle in the cone area which will make cleaning this filter easier.
The tap came in and I was able to use it to thread the PVC pipe. This allowed the threaded side of a hose barb fitting to connect securely to the PVC pipe.
Attachment:

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3-21-18-AP-Air-system-upgrades-threaded-hose-barb-installation-90-degree-angle
Testing tapping the PVC pipe for a hose barb
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3-21-18-AP-Air-system-upgrades-threaded-hose-barb-installation-45-degree-angle
Setting the hose barb at 45 degrees gives the polyethylene tubing a better angle heading up t the surface of the water.
Attachment:

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March-15-18-Air-lift-pump-air-chamber-still-needs-air-holes
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March-15-18-Air-lift-pump-air-chamber-together-still-needs-air-holes-inside

Okay I've built the air-lift pump and tested it.

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and a close up

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This is a sleeve over the main PVC pipe which has a series of tiny holes drilled in it which allows dozens of entry points for air bubbles.
-----------
Does it work?
That depends on several factors coming together or not...
I had a heck of a time finding parts I needed to create a drain if it did work
I sealed the current air delivery system as best I could and learned the first lesson in low pressure air delivery; even a minor leaks depletes all air pressure.
The air-lift pump raised the water around six inches with minimal air pressure. Not good enough for what I need in relocating the new cone-bottom RFF.
This is the first test with air from the giant aquarium style pump


As you can see this is rather mundane flow and I had to lay the PVC pipe over on its side to get even this much flow.So I decided to connect the air-lift pump to compressed air. Again it took forever to find the adapters i needed to add a valve to the air line.
The compressor is off and has been all day and has ~15 to 20 psi which of course I had to try, right?


Now that moved a crap-load of water, in fact it hit the ceiling of the greenhouse before it blew the unglued PVC fittings apart
Okay I needed to add a valve...
I dug and dug through every box of plumbing fittings I could find, finally found a 1/4" nipple

Okay tried the air compressor again, this time with a valve in line to lower the pressure, amazing! What I was seeing was a full flow from a 1 1/2" PVC pipe with a lift of 30"!!!
To continue these tests with verifiable results I need to put an air pressure gauge on the air supply and have a helper ready to measure gallons per minute. Also I'll move forward rebuilding the air delivery system from the air pump we use in the aquaponics system instead of the more costly and dirty air compressor used in the auto mechanics shop.

A guess is I can easily hit my desired mark of 30gph with an increased head height to 24".

Now that I know the air-lift pump can do what I need it to do, I can plan what the next steps are to clean the water for our 2600 gallon trout pond.
For now, I need to get ready as I just got the first job since retiring due to inflammatory arthritis building a tower for Desertgate Internet. This is of course a rush job too. I'll be working with Jason again. We need to start tomorrow. Exciting times!
Brian Rodgers
 
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