Day Six of Filter Replacement - BHM arrives and the vats get cleaned

With the filtration all running smoothly overnight, Craig (DannyKoi), Tony (KoiKare) and Sid were on site nice and early.

Overnight I had noticed that the heater had tripped out, we beleive this is because the significant power drawer when it kick in was too much for its dedicated breaker. After speaking with Neil, a replacement intelligent breaker has been ordered and will be fitted in a weeks time.

Tony brought 320kg of BHM with him. One 250kg bag and seven boxes. To ensure I had my 200kg we emptied five of the boxes and filled them from the bag. Sid and Craig then emptied the remaining BHM onto a tapaulin on the drive and broke each bar into 3 or 4 smaller bits and the. wheelbarrowed it round to the filter house.

Both of the 4 tier bakki showers and the spray bars had to be taken apart so we could add the media tier by tier.

The media so soon all around the back and being placed in the bakki showers. Following a lot of advice we fully loaded the bottom three tiers of each shower and then placed the remainder into the top tier.

As you can see, on the walls behind the showers there had been a lot of splashing overnight so we decided to put a waterproof membrane onto the walls to protect from further damage. We also cut pieces of polycarbonate sheeting to rest between each tier of the showers to again reduce the amount of splashing out of the showers.

Once that was in place we refitted the spray bars and the return pipes onto the spigots at the bottom of each shower. As a final preventative measure we placed a few pipes into the two header tank pond returns to prevent all the BHM dust and small bits getting washed through and into the pond.

The whole system was now fully up and running which was brilliant. As a bit of fine tuning there were still a few air bubbles getting through the return pipes into the pond mainly because one of the returns from the shower was going close to the bottom return in the header tank. To stop his happening we put and 90 degree elbow onto a short straight, then onto another 90 elbow, on another short straight and then finally into another 90 elbow. This basically resulted in the water coming up and out of this return rather than splashing down.

Whilst Craig and I were adjusting the pipes in the header tank, Sid was power washing each vat and then disinfecting them with Virkon. This is a really important job otherwise the next person would end up with dirty vats having stagnant and smelly water.

We then hoovered out the BHM small dust and bits from the bottom of the header tank and removed the protection pipes. It's always a fun task using the pond hoover, sometimes it works and others it just lasts 10 seconds and blocks....this was one of those days!

That was a big and positive Saturday done.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy