Boy I am late to the Party aren't I???????
Kurt, the shower (On no, he didn't just call this a "Shower"
) is coming along nicely. I can't wait to see how many times you have to install and remove those diffuser disks until you find just the right configuration that distributes the water evenly across the entire surface of the Rio Media blocks.
That FlowFriendPro is pretty amazing to provide that much water for that little wattage. At 70 watts I could probably get 3000 GPH through a few of my airlift manifolds at 11" of lift, if I got the submergence deep enough, but there is no way I could get the 7000+ GPH without using almost 3 times that electricity.
Now onto The Debate...
Can someone show me where "crashing, shearing, splashing, etc..." of water onto a surface is superior at oxygenation, VS simple old surface area interaction with the atmosphere?
Surface area interaction with the atmosphere is where 99% of the aeration of the pond is achieved when using aerated bottom drains. It isn't the small air bubbles being pumped into the water that aerates the pond, it is the bringing the water deep in the pond up to the surface so the water molecules will have interaction with the atmosphere and aerate the pond.
My thoughts have always been that if you can break up 8,000 GPH into over 1700 individual streams of water (that is the minimum flow rate for the Full Sized Zakki Shower and how many holes there are in the distribution manifold), then you will aerate that water better than if you used a simple pipe spraybar and broke that water into 100 JETS of water at the top of the shower. That is why I made the Zakki Showers with that complex distribution manifold so that I could evenly break up that water and turn it into a shower instead of a spraybar. With a spraybar...Once that water touches the media, it stops being a jet and it starts to slowly meander down the surface of the media until it gets to the bottom of the show tray. Then it breaks up into maybe 100 thick streams of water and flows onto the second layer of media in your standard showers. The only crashing, smashing, hair pulling that happens in these multi-stack trays is at the very top under the spraybar and maybe at the top of each media stack if the trays are separated enough. everywhere else in the media pack the water is gracefully flowing around or through the media and it certainly isn't crashing.
Now that we have this Rio Media in nice 12" x 12" x 2" thick blocks we can break up this water after every single block of media and aerated so much better than when I was using 2"x2"x2" Cermedia blocks and enclosing them in a single perforated basket.
Then I let the water pass through the Rio Media blocks for nitrification, and then I break the water back up with my divider plates (same ones Kurt is using in this shower) so it can get aerated again before passing through the second Rio Media block. So lets play with some numbers using Kurts shower as an example...
There are 12 Rio Media columns in this shower
There are 3 blocks total in each column
There are 2 of my divider plates in each column, that will actually break up the water into tiny drops for aeration purposes (we are going to ignore whatever distribution plate that Kurt makes on top of the media and the bottom divider plate because it may be slightly submerged at the bottom thus not breaking up the water)
There will be at most 10,000 GPH going through this shower, so if it is evenly distributed that is 833 GPH going through each stack of media
After the water passes through the top block of media it will be broken up into roughly 484 individual streams by my divider plate before it falls onto the second block of media
That is 1.7 gallons per hour passing through each hole of the divider plate so that should provide plenty of dwell time to aerate those drops
Then it will pass through the second block for nitrification before being broken up again into 484 streams and then into the third Rio block
So... 12(484 + 484) = 11,616 individual streams of water that are constantly in contact with the atmosphere for exchanging of gasses
If this shower (oh crap I did it again) does NOTHING ELSE it will perforation aeration and nitrification better than anyone can imagine, and it will do it at an incredibly low energy cost.
Just for fun I am going to leave this video here for aeration purposes... This is 3,150 GPH flowing through each stack of Rio Media (6,300 GPH Total)