This day five Friday was the last day for Simon and Neil so there was always a lot of pressure to everything coming together for this one day. Everyone was on site before 8 which was good but did emphasise the task ahead. In addition to Simon (Nippon), Neil and Craig (Dannykoi) were two electricians Frank and Craig. Having two Craig's on site did cause a bit of confusion at times although the two electricians were superb.
Craig (Dannykoi) started the morning off by cutting through the concrete of my side path so the electric, water and conduit pipes could be feed into the garage and connected up. With a lot of dust and noise, the neatest of holes was in place and the cables fed under the wall into the garage.
Also as a little lesson we have also found out that all the drainpipes are actually all feeding soakaways onto the garden so that will be a reduction to the water bill!!
In the filter house Simon and Neil were creating the pipework to connect the flow friends to the spray bars that would feed over the bakki showers. Once complete they moved on to create and connect the return pipework from the 4" spigot at the bottom of each shower into the header tank. In parallel with this happening Craig and Frank (the sparkies) were adding a new breaker board, plug sockets and wiring everything up within the filter house. The original breaker in the filter house wasn't ideal because if one thing on the main circuit in the garage would switch off it would take the whole break with it. This new breaker doesn't do that because each unit now has its own separate earth so therefore everything is independent and if something does break it will won't impact anything else. This is much much better than before! Thankfully the filter house is large because with four guys in there all trying to work around each other it was a little tight...
The drum control box was connected up and placed into the bannister. As you can see from the pictures the placement of all these control boards this was a really neat and tidy piece of work.
Finally for Simon and Neil was the connection of the drum to a large waste wheelie bin and a sump pump. The sump pump was suspended within the wheelie bin and hooked into the old waste pipes that nicely waters the flower bed.
Next for Craig and Frank was to connect up the electricity to the main board within the garage. Again a very neat and tidy job with the cable connected up and clamped in around all the rafters.
Whilst all this was happening, Craig (Dannykoi) and I were emptying the water from the vats that had been on the patio for the week. The pond had been filling from the tap overnight but it had only filled about 1.5 - 2 ft so we still had at least 6ft to go. We started by emptying the large holding vat with a two inch flexi pipe and Craig sucking the water through and then letting gravity do the rest.
Once this large vat was empty we then put the 'keeper' koi from the vat nearest the pond back into the main pond. We immediately put a large air stone into the pond. Once this was done the water from the vat was then pumped back into the pond.
We then realised that we still needed a lot of water so added an additional hosepipe and many thanks to the neighbours for that.
The koi from the 50/50 vat were then separated with three going back into the main pond and then rest were placed into the move on vat. Now the vat was empty of koi the water was pimped back into the main pond.
Thankfully by 4pm everything was in place (except the BHM media) for the new filtration system to be turned on. Firstly the four ball valves on the 4" inputs to the drum were opened.
Next the drum was turned on... We hit a hitch straight away. The drum had been stood on the patio for about three months before being plumbed in which had cause the rubber seal around the actual drum unit to stick to the casing and this was issue one. The second issue was more of a problem that this rubber seal had a manufacturer fault as it was slightly too long which meant it has crimped up at one section. This exacerbated the sticking issue when the drum tried to turn. After speaking with Paul at Select (where we bought the drum) and then Mark the actual designer of the drum we were advised to lower the float switch as this would reduce the weight of the water in the outer part of the drum so it could eventually equalise and level the water between the inner and outer drum. After wetting all the way around the outer part of the seal and with a little push we started a clean cycle of the drum. It worked!! This issue did cost us about 3hours of waiting for phone calls and understandably did see some solid working relationships pushed to the limit. Saying that the drum was working and now the flow friend pumps were turned on. These pumps are simple work horses and they just work efficiently and in silence. Thankfully the header tank didn't overflow and gravity feed via the new 4" returns back to the pond worked perfectly.
This was a huge relief for everyone. As I had been advised the water clarity would be far from ideal when the system was turned on the for the first time and this was certainly the case! Saying I was advised to give it a few days and let the drum do its thing.
Whilst all this was going on Tony (Nemo) was driving to and back from Yume Koi in Portishead. In theory this was an ok journey but in practise definitely not a good idea on the Friday before a bank holiday weekend!! On the positive side Tony had picked up all the media in a huge sack as Mike didn't have time to box it all up.
We booked Mark (the designer of the BD drum) to come and replace the rubber seal on the Tuesday morning following the bank holiday weekend.
I had a working system and was extremely pleased this had all been done so quickly. All that was left now was to put the garden back to normal and backfill the return pipe trench!
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