Well done and beautiful pond!
Three questions:
Does a FF have to be run all the time, or can it be done intermittently?
Could it be positioned above a moving bed so that it drains into the moving bed? I cannot really have anything like this pond-side, the pond will be raised and accessible from all sides.
How are most people providing flow to one of these now?
I would think you could run it intermittently if you wanted... most of my foam seemed to
be created overnight. The foam would be the worst in the spring time when the water warmed
up and it would stop making foam about mid summer and I'd turn it off. Now that both ponds
are several years old I don't get foam at all anymore. Or else my filtration is better than it was
back then... not sure which made it stop.
You might have trouble keeping the media from getting sucked onto the pump but other than that
I'd think a moving bed would work fine. The water just needs to be pretty clean.
I pulled my water from the top of a s/g filter and returned it to the stream the s/g filter fed. Worked
great when it was needed.
What am I doing wrong - the FF is producing a lot of foam, but a lot is also getting back into the pond.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Right, but if you turned off your FF all of the foam it's removing would be in the pond, your system just doesn't "show" that they are there.
Would you rather not see any foam evidence and have the doc's or would you rather be working on removing them so that they do eventually go away?
The FF is performing beautifully but if you would prefer to have the doc's in the pond, turn it off. The FF is not creating the doc's, it is just exposing the amount of them you have and is working on extricating them from the system.
Yup, the issue is not aesthetics it’s whether I can do anything more to extract that foam before it hits the pond with my FF design.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I think itll be a little tougher since you have plants in your pond: plants + dirt = organics
Maybe slow down the dwell time and make sure that their arent any pockets of mulm sitting around.
But as long as you have a large amount of DOCs present - the sheering water inside your FF will create foam on the surface of the water
Last edited by rainblood; 05-13-2019 at 12:40 PM.
I just built one of these. Been running since Monday.
So far....no foam yet.
What did I do wrong ????
Thank you guys.
I set mine under the shade/inside a tree.
Hopefully this will helps with all the bubbles that I been floating in the pond.
Another question............What should I do with those foam?.............wash it out or dump it onto my garden?
Wanted to bump this thread and share my experience. 10 years later and this thread has still been a huge help. I don't think Ethan is around anymore but if you ever see this again, thanks!
Quick details on my pond:
4000g with about 30 16-20" fish
2x 4" BDs to an RDF then DIY shower
Skimmer to 55g moving bed filter to 3x TPRs
My pond was built exactly a year ago so it's still quite new. Over the last few weeks I've started to get a lot of foam on the surface, especially in the morning. It seems to dissipate later in the day but I always have a hazy film on the surface which makes the water look cloudy despite my water being very clear. And even with a skimmer, it just never seems to go away.
This is what it looks like early in the morning:
And here's what it looks like after turning off the waterfall for a few minutes. Clear as glass, this is the look I want at all times.
Here's the unit I built, pretty much exactly like Ethan's original design in the first post. Main tube is 5', 6" piping. I used a 2" gate valve to allow for more fine tuning compared to a ball valve.
Took about 1cuft of 1" bio barrels (purchased from Pentair AES). The unit sits behind my waterfall and shower filters and is secured to the fence. Water is supplied by a submersible pump that's placed in the top spillway of my waterfall. This water is after the RDF and shower filters so it's very clean.
After about 10 minutes of running I started to get the first burps of foam! I later changed the outlet to a 3" elbow as this setup added a lot of height for the foam to leave.
5 hours later, around 11pm my little 1 gallon bucket had overflowed! I emptied it out and went to bed.
And here is what I woke up to this morning!!!! I'm gonna need a bigger bucket
After just 12hrs the pond surface is much cleaner, much less foam. Can't wait to get rid of this stuff for good
~ Jose