A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

filtration ideas?

I was wondering if anyone would be willing to educate me on your personal filtration setups. I currently am building a swirl type filter and was wondering if there was anything else that I could add to reduce the amounts of solids building in my plumbing

0 members like this

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Andrew Coscia on January 13, 2014 at 8:09pm

my fish died because my teenage brother un-plugged my heater. i came home from out of town and had a tank full of frozen fish sticks. last time i pay him to fish sit for me. sorry still no pictures. i havent had a day off in a while, and im getting home after dark.

Permalink Reply by Andrew Coscia on January 14, 2014 at 2:08pm

Ok i took the day off to post some photos. don't beat me up too bad, it's still under construction. I'll put them on my profile

Attachments:

Permalink Reply by John Malone on January 14, 2014 at 6:39pm

Looks very good to me. Better than a lot of systems I've seen.

One comment though. It looks like you've got the inlet and outlet at the same end of the media bed. You might get better flow through if they were at opposite ends.

Very neat system though. A lot neater than mine, I can tell you. Well done.

Permalink Reply by Rob Nash on January 18, 2014 at 11:48am

thanks John, that's a relief.. notice.. you didn't say I don't sound like a D sometimes... lol
Im always glad to help :-)

Permalink Reply by Pat James on January 18, 2014 at 1:17pm

I'm impressed by the 'pretty' systems everybody seems to have. My own is far more crude and ulitarian. I pump water into a 275 gallon IBC that acts as a cistern and the water flows through a manifold in 4 different directions. Two of these are through 3/4 inch pipe into revised swirl/radial filtesr in 55 gallon barrels. From that filter, water drains into a 1/2 IBC containing some plastic products as filtration media and then sipnon to another bed before emptying back into the FT. I'll explain how I made slight changes to the swirl filter in a bit.

Two other outlets on that manifold empty into 1.5 inch lines each feeding a series of DWC growbeds, 5 on one side and 4 on the other. Some of these have some of the same plastic media in net bags. I get a fairly large amount of sludge (mainly algae, but with a few other materials) building up throughout. I have thought about adding a sand filter as a scrubber/polisher after the radials, but figure that would clog quickly and give me more problems.

I remove gallons of this algae sludge weekly and still my water is almost opaque. For the past several weeks I have fed very little due to the cold.

Permalink Reply by Pat James on January 18, 2014 at 1:25pm

I want to try to describe the way I built my combined radial swirl filters. I have two. Each is based on a 55 gallon blue barrel in which I have suspended an inverted 5 gallon plastic bucket. Into the center of the bucket I inserted a 3/4 inch pipe. That goes down about 2/3 of the depth of the inverted barrel then Tees with short lengths of pipe. Then the ends are angled upward but at about a 45 degree angle.

The idea is that water comes down the center pipe then is directed up under the bucket like a radial filter but also swirls slowing the bigger particles so they drop to the bottom of the 55 gallon barrel. I was impressed with just how much material is pulled out of suspension.