Trickle Tower??

[BOTR]

Building my own set of Bio- Towers, but am planning on sending a small volume of water through it, some thing like 4 GPH through a 6inch 4 foot tall tower.... Any thoughts?

I will be using an aqua lifter pump, and filling the tower with either scrubbies, or some other Bio media. Feeding the water through the top, and letting it drain into the tank throught the Bio media. I will be using the pre-filter for the aqua lifter.

Anyway gimme your thoughts, I am thinking of making this a manifold and adding more as things progress with my tank. BTW there are for my 84x48x30.
I will continue using my 3 FX5's, but hope to rely on them more for mech, not bio.


Thanks,
Chris

 

[unknownuza13]

Sounds good to me.. Let us know how it works. These trickle towers are interesting to me.

 

[johnptc]

Building my own set of Bio- Towers, but am planning on sending a small volume of water through it, some thing like 4 GPH through a 6inch 4 foot tall tower.... Any thoughts?

I will be using an aqua lifter pump, and filling the tower with either scrubbies, or some other Bio media. Feeding the water through the top, and letting it drain into the tank throught the Bio media. I will be using the pre-filter for the aqua lifter.

Anyway gimme your thoughts, I am thinking of making this a manifold and adding more as things progress with my tank. BTW there are for my 84x48x30.
I will continue using my 3 FX5's, but hope to rely on them more for mech, not bio.


Thanks,
Chris

i am running two...... 12"diamx 8 feet and 18"x 8 feet...........filled with bio balls.... flows are 50 GPM and 100GPM. they do a great job...bio filter release gases from the water and allow O2 to be absorbed....


4 gph or 4 gpm ?????????????????????????????????????

 

[BOTR]

4gph. These are normaly used for C02 reactor's or to keep your overflow from sucking air. Figured that the slow rate would increase the efficiency, on a system that currently needs no additional filtration.

Adding to that the fact that I only have the ability to add about 4 feet of height, but can add as many 4 foot towers as I'd like. I know the flow rate is very slow, but it should function pretty well. How do you go about calculating the "best" flow rate through these things? More flow has to equal less efficient to some degree. Even if I end up running 10, or even 15 of these I still can do all this for under $200. I figure about $18+/- a tower would be my cost, And Im sure this would be an excellent filter if I expand it enough.

One of the ideas I have had is to connect the outputs of all of them into one large pipe, and have this feed back into the tank. This would make the unit itself huge, but have very little intrusion into the display. Even at 20 towers, with 2x1" outputs into the tank this would still be reasonable to me. 10 per manifold and at some point I know I could catch up with the tanks bio-load.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[johnptc]

4gph. These are normaly used for C02 reactor's or to keep your overflow from sucking air. Figured that the slow rate would increase the efficiency, on a system that currently needs no additional filtration.

Adding to that the fact that I only have the ability to add about 4 feet of height, but can add as many 4 foot towers as I'd like. I know the flow rate is very slow, but it should function pretty well. How do you go about calculating the "best" flow rate through these things? More flow has to equal less efficient to some degree. Even if I end up running 10, or even 15 of these I still can do all this for under $200. I figure about $18+/- a tower would be my cost, And Im sure this would be an excellent filter if I expand it enough.

One of the ideas I have had is to connect the outputs of all of them into one large pipe, and have this feed back into the tank. This would make the unit itself huge, but have very little intrusion into the display. Even at 20 towers, with 2x1" outputs into the tank this would still be reasonable to me. 10 per manifold and at some point I know I could catch up with the tanks bio-load.

Thanks,
Chris

high flow is good for:
degassing
bringing oxygen to the bacteria

slow flow is good for allowing the bacteria to eat and convert the bad to good

i hope this helps... others will chime in.....

 

[Nic]

I think I would hook it to the return of the fx5 adding the head to the canister would slow the flow a lot