Ultra High Tech 300 gallon Discus install journal

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
drum filter ships out tomorrow. should be here end of the week or first of next week.

I deleted the control box and sensors that come with it and I am going to have the Apex controller monitor and activate the cleaning cycle instead. Should be easy to do, everything is referenced off float switches to trigger the cleaning cycle.
 
KC15 drum filter - 30 micron - self cleaning - 2,900gph max flow - (2x) 4" inlets and (2x) 4" outlets.

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The sight glasses are plumbed into both sides of the filter. As the filter becomes clogged the water level will rise in the sight glass on the right and will eventually trip a float switch which will tell the Apex to turn on the drum rotation motor and the jet pump for the cleaning spray nozzles for a set amount of time.

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Less than 2' cubed. Very compact and well built, probably weighs 50-60lbs
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Built in internal overflow that is height adjustable in case the filter ever clogs and the cleaning cycle does not start.
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Are you going to be running any other mechanical filtration after this to really polish the water, or are you happy with 40 microns being fine enough?

Doing away with the 25 micron cartridge filter and pressure pump and just running the drum filter. I will swap it out for the optional 30 micron screen though, and once the tank is running for a while I will probably experiment with 100 - 60 - 40 and 30 micron screens and see what works best. Changing the screen out is fairly easy to do.

I will keep my sponge prefilter canisters on my Bio/UV closed loop line just as fail safe to keep anything passing through and as an extra bio surface. They should only need rinsed out once or twice a year I'm thinking.
 
tinkering around with the drum filter and opened it up to have a look inside.

this is the waste run off tray inside the drum that catches all the sprayed off goop.

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Such a simple (but genius) idea, I'll be very interested to see how it goes once you have the tank up and running. Do you think the screen will require any more thorough cleaning than it gets with the jets in the long-term? Am I right in thinking you said you already run one of these on your koi pond?
 
I'm sure the drum filter will require one Saturday a year of really opening it up and cleaning it out good. The screens seem to hold up fine in heavy solids load koi ponds. The cleaning jets are at 50psi, so they really clean the screen off good.

One thing I'm thinking of doing is putting a small presump before the drum filter with an initial up flow chamber to catch the odd fish that always ends up in the sump and then spill over through a set of 1500 micron filter bags before going into the drum.

This would give me chance to save anything that took a ride down the overflow and keep any real large leaves or gravel from doing into the drum. If the debris in the drum is too heavy it never gets washed out, so a prefilter just to catch the really big trash might be good idea in the long run.
 
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