Lo Folks,
Been away for a bit. Really busy this year, flying all over the place. Thankfully the pond has been doing well, and the RDF's kept things spick and span with minimal incidents. I've figured out that a lot of my problems have been to do with excessive pressure. Fitting a cheap regulator between my pressure pump and the RDF should hopefully reduce the incidence of further issues.
My family's recently acquired an empty piece of land just down the road from where our house currently is. It's about 1.5x what we have currently, and we're in the process of planning the construction of a new home on it.
The fish will be getting a new home too, if things play out well and good. It'll be a while yet before earth is broken, but much of the joy is the process of getting there!
I'm going to move away from the formal square hole-in-the ground model. The new land is at the base of a 45degree incline, and includes much of the gradient. I'll be using that, and putting in a good sized 10-15ft waterfall in the corner. I'm hoping to increase overall pond volume, including filter to 20000 gal.
The new filter should be an adventure in the making. I've been looking at installing a sieve and RDF in series to optimize waste removal from the water stream, and now I have the space to actually do it.
The plan right now is to grossly oversize the sieves, allowing for theoretical max capacity of 40000gph.
The RDFs will have in comparison maybe only 20000gph of handling capacity (I'm planning on installing two modified BE RDFs), and will be used only for removing things that get past the sieves. They will be run on a timer; If they block before the timer triggers, excess flow will just bypass the units. The same timer will operate jets to purge the sieve screens.
The idea is that the RDFs will filter only part of the water moving through the system. They can also be completely shut down for servicing, at the relatively low cost of less than crystal clear water, since the relatively maintenance-free sieves are taking the worst of the debris out of the water stream.
The BE RDF modifications will likely be as follows
- 200mm (8") single intake, 6" twin outlets
- Rework of the hydro drive to remove the internal solenoid/float as I plan on triggering the RDFs using a out-of-pond AC solenoid valve managed by a Neptune Apex controller. All the RDFs need is an adequately pressurized water supply to run.
- Metal drive gear. This is a nice to have, and isn't absolutely essential. It rapidly gets very expensive as relatively exotic metals like duplex/SS316L/Ti need to be used for the corrosive pond environment. I am asking Aquscience if they can look at making something like this standard or an optional upgrade. For them it might just add 200bucks to the unit cost. For us, one-off pieces might cost upwards of $1000.
For sieves, I have two options.
1. Ultrasieve XL "LOW' units in parallel, 200 micron sieve upgrade.
2. A custom made sieve bend
Leaning to #1 right now as I am not confident of getting the sieve angle right. Waste collection and management is also a bit scary as all I have is paper diagrams that in practice may not work well.
I'll do a pit drawing in a bit.