Filtration upgrade two - Drum and Two Bakki Showers bought

Following on from my tough koi keeping start to this year I have made the significant decision to upgrade the complete filtration system. The main reasons behind this are to reduce the maintenance, to load balance power feeds and to importantly to improve the water quality for the koi.

 

The plans for the main pond are as follows

• Replace the existing two sieves with a large BD700 drum filter. The drum has been customised to have additional inputs so it now has four 4" inputs. The four inputs will be used for the two bottom drains and two skimmer feeds.
• Each of the two outputs from the drum will be connected to a flowfriend pump
• Each flowfriend pump will push water over a 1m double width 4-tier bakki shower. This replaces the roto concept gravity showers.
• The bottom of each bakki show has changed from the standard weir return to have a welded boxed off bottom with a 4" steel return. This 4" will the return to the pond by gravity.
• This setup will require one rather significant change to pipework. We will need to add two 4" returns back to the pond and to cut through the existing block work and fibreglassing!
• One of the existing 2" pond returns will be reused as a input to the filter house. This will be connected to an 8k Eco pump then into the 15k air source heat pump, then into the 110w UV and then to the pond via an existing 2" return.

The drum and bakki showers are now on site. The two 4-tier double width Bakki Showers are second hand from Mike at Yume Koi and were taken off his outdoor back pond a week ago. I was very lucky with the timing here because buying new would have been a significant increase and would have forced a change to the plans. This picture below shows the bakki showers and especially shows the welded boxed off bottom with a 4" steel return. Even the chickens are showing a big interest in them (top left of the picture).

The twenty boxes of BHM for the bakki showers are due to arrive into the UK around 17 August so hopefully will be with Mike by 19 / 20 August. Once this arrives on site we will be all good to go with the install.

 

 

Not to leave out the growing on tank, I have a couple of small change in there.

Firstly, I have added a profi auto feeder. These are really simple and certainly aren't cheap but they are superb bits of kit. The setup of the timing computer is very simple and they just a few sturdy screws to attach to the wall. Other auto feeders I've had ended up crushing the koi pellets therefore get blocked up after about a week and also the feeder timing computer stopped working after six months.

 

The second cosmetic change was really inspired following on from a couple of recent Kangei club nights at member's ponds (Nemo's (Tony Pinn) and also at Paul Randall's). I realised that my growing on outhouse was a total mess, I couldn't get to anything easily and needed to do something about it. So onto eBay, I purchased three BigDug 1800mm (H) x 900mm (W) x 450mm (D) and very impressively they arrived the next day with a free rubber mallet. Always amusing is their "standard build time" saying it can only take 10 mins per shelving unit. Maybe the case with an army of competent helpers!!! For me, one and a half hours later the first unit was assembled. They are nothing exciting but they are extremely functional and have made a huge difference to the space available.

 

 

 

 

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