First a Big thanks to Billy at Cascade and Zac from Deepwater along with a lot of others who have helped me with questions and offered advice.
I think y'all know what an ordeal this beast of an inherited pond has been. It has consumed my every waking minute since spring and as soon as I got it up and running I immediately started identifying deficiencies and started upgrades...
The last few weekends I disconnected all 8 of the 55 gallon strapping filled barrels from the bottom drains that were being run by an airlift which on another thread it was determined it was flowing around 3k gal per hour. Not enough. I did, upon cleaning out the barrels and making an acre sized pile of discarded strapping, determine they were sure capturing crap, they just weren't getting clean when I'd clean the barrels. The muck was thick in there and oh lord, the stench...
That all got replaced with an ultra seive I ordered from Billy. I am in love with that beast. That's on an ES8500 that I also ordered from Billy. I couldn't believe the crap it's picking up from the bottom now. (Not that I could see the bottom, more on that later)
Last weekend I did all the barrel conversions. 4 of them became more sand and gravel filters in parallel. Those feed 2 more barrels I turned into moving beds with K1 also ordered from Billy. Those two gravity flow back to the pond. They all already had 4 inch in and outs through uniseal so that's wasn't changed. The pump output goes into the bottom of the sand and gravel barrels via 2inch to 4 inch adapters.
This weekend, I installed the no niche skimmer ordered from Zac. It's plumbed into what used to be the 4 inch airlift return and dumps (gravity for now) into the the airlift collector. I had to retire the airlift so that big 8 inch collector needed to be put to good use. Right now that's gravity flowing through the collector and into the 7th barrel. Right now I have a submersible in the barrel and I'm dumping the output of that into the seive but the plan is to move the ES5500 that's overloaded trying to push 2 S&G plus EVO 110 over to the new skimmer and seal the top of the collector so it can be put on pump suction.
I'll put another 8500 where the 5500 used to be for more more flow to the other 2 S&G, shower, UV and underwater returns.
This weekend was also the first of what will be several marathon PP treatments. I think some will recall another thread where my water was just not clearing up and I was pretty sure it wasn't algae anymore. It was just hazy and so much stuff settling on the walls and everywhere. I could see no more than a foot down. Heck, I'd never seen the baby fish after I added them a couple months ago.
Yesterday I spent the whole day doing low doses. Still haven't got it to hold pink (forget about purple for now) for more than a half hour. It was late so I let the last dose yesterday go brown then reversed it with TS and I was pretty disappointed when I went to bed because the whole thing just looked like a big pot of coffee.
This morning however, even though it's still brown, I can see a foot further down than I could before and all day long today I was able to see the baby fish skirting the edges of the pond, nibbling on whatever they were finding there.
It's going to take a few more marathons to get it back into shape for all the months it ran with too little filtration and too little circulation but for the first time I feel like I'm getting ahead of it.
Today was the first morning I could walk out there (like I do every morning, hoping to see progress, only to be met with murky water and foam) and see deeper, notice a clearing of the haze, and only the slightest bit of foam in the shower.
I'm not gonna mention the nastiness that rolled out of the blowout on the S&G filters today after the PP yesterday .. Brown/Orange yuck. I am waiting to do the sodium percarbonate until I'm completely done with the PP series so I'll have to look at brown water for a while but it's sure better than looking at hazy water.