Currently I am working on upgrading our mechanical filtration. Currently we have 100 Brook Trout in our 2600 gallon tank.
These are from my morning newsletter which I've brought back to life in celebration of working toward getting my health back together. Let me know if you're interested. This is an email list like the old days, lol!
Good morning!
We do need more room for plants. What can I do about it right now when it would be most advantageous? That's the question. We still have cattle on our pasture. I called the guy that leases the space and asked him to get them off or fix the fence where they are getting into the yard. He's coming out today to see what we can do. I want to uncover our Koi pond, but the cows keep coming in for water. The cows rub against everything, the house, the pond, the picnic table. Our dogs make matters worse when the cows come in the yard by chasing them around in utter chaos, well that's what happened to the fence anyway.
I'm still suffering with inflammatory arthritis and have been for a week. Sometimes everything together feels overwhelming. I decided to take a pain killer this morning to see if that would help. I hope so.
Even when life isn't full-on intense the little things can wear us down. I've taken to writing my morning newsletter again and this makes me feel clearer and better.
I've got the new cone-bottom barrel (CBB) in the living-room while I figure out how I want to plumb the interior. I'm so thankful my wife is interested and encouraging as I explain mechanical musings. It makes writing my ideas and questions down easier and hopefully clearer after I explained and discussed the concepts of the new radial flow filter (RFF) with her yesterday.
I love the way RFF works. A geyser of fish waste flows up from the SLO (bottom drains) which reverses direction due to gravity and falls gently to the bottom of the barrel. This all works because of the rate of flow at each stage of this type of mechanical filtration is gentle. With the RFF we currently run the barrel is tall and narrow with a flow of 5 GPM. It is my intention to increase the flow through the filters to 30 GPM. The flow increase must not disturb the fish waste or it may dissolve in the water making it more difficult to filter out.
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In the image I pulled off the Internet this morning calls the integral part of an RFF a "Shroud" I'll call it a "Stilling Well." The Stilling Well separates the flow moving down from the surrounding body of clear water.
As BYAP Scotty mentioned, the designers of these CBB didn't leave much room to get in the top of the tank to work. Considerations now are whether being able to pressurize the filter is something I care about and or would cutting the top opening larger be okay? I'm leaning toward removing the top so I can create the flows I need.
I'll need to take advantage of the wider CBB as flow through the larger diameter will be slower.
What I see with this design is flow needs to move all the way around the stilling well to get to the outflow. Wouldn't this disrupt the flow dropping to the bottom of the barrel? Something similar may happen at the bottom of the stilling well with increased flow. I'm considering a wider stilling well to increase the area water can move in as to spread the flow and decrease velocity.
So fitting a wider Stilling Well into the barrel will require a wider top, unless I can find a way to create an expanding shaft such as an umbrella employs.
I come back to the question of whether I need a sealed chamber. I don't see other RFFs sealed. Our current RFF isn't closed on top, although it does have a lid. I think I wanted a lid to protect it from overflowing if clogged.
Would a sealed chamber just stop flowing if the outflow became clogged?
Outside the weather looks promising
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This is my story for this morning.
Thanks for reading, I'll be listening for replies.
Brian
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3-27-2018
Good morning
Thanks to a friend on Facebook and his post about earwig wings and Depsua, Joeblow, Scotty435 and others here, I have a really neat plan for building a folding Stilling Well inside my new radial flow filter for our aquaponics system.
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Loren Kaysing wrote: So earwigs have wings. Incredible ones. Who knew? They fold down immensely, as much as 18:1 in some species, using some sort of self-folding spring structure that doesn't require any musculature, and locks in place when deployed. Looks like they basically shake them quickly to unfurl them, and then one beat and they fold themselves up and disappear under their shell
Here's a pretty gold one that stretches its wings at 0:30
In case you missed it:
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The reason I want a larger stilling well is to slow the velocity of water / fish waste movement as it drops down inside the cone-bottom tank. My hope is by slowing the waste water it will freely drop with less agitation and stay in the cone part for easy removal.
I still need to speak with the man who is helping on the Charter school (Rio Gallinas) AP Mariano Ulibarri to see if my idea can be created with a 3D printer.
In a nutshell I need to install a shroud inside the small mouth of the barrel and have it spread like an umbrella inside.
