'Veggie' Filter

BenignVanilla wrote:

"K30a" wrote in message
...

Don't use lava rock.
The veggie filter will catch 'gunk' and the lava rock will be very hard to
clean.

My veggie filter is as simple as floating water hyacinths at the top of my
upflow mech/bio filter.
Things grow like crazy and I have to watch they don't plug the outlet.

Bonnie has a good veggie filter and pictures.
So does BV. Hope they catch this and post their
plans.


One of these days, I'll post pictures...but not until the construction is
done. The area looks like $#^@& right now. Here is a synopsis though.

I have approx. a 3000 gallon pond, with a bottom drain. The bottom drain
empties into the VF, so my VF us gravity fed. My VF was unfortunately built
uphill from the pond, so I had a lot of liner showing. To resolve this, I
built a sandbag wall covered in stone across the VF. So water gravity feeds
to the lower VF, which contains water iris. A 1000GPH pump pushes water to
the otherside of the wall in the VF, which rises up, hides my liner, and
then overflows to a stream which flows back into the main pond. As this was
an afterthought, I also have a 4'' PVC pipe that runs under the stream. A
small amount of water flows through there.

In my upper VF, I have nothing but Water Hyacinth. They are massive now, and
my water (when I STOP MESSING WITH THE DAMN POND) is gin clear. The roots of
the WH are constantly coated in muck, and periodic squeeze (away from the
pond) of the roots, will remove tons of goo from the pond itself. The
multi-level VF, also helps with settleage.

Does that help?

Just curious; with a bottom drain into the lower VF, what happens if the
power or the pump goes out?

DT

"dt" wrote in message
...
snip
Just curious; with a bottom drain into the lower VF, what happens if the
power or the pump goes out?

I lose circulation, and potentially my main pond would overflow about 1/2-1
inch of water as the bigger VF area drains down into the lower. I used to
have a check valve in place at the in-flow of the VF, but I recently took it
out.

BV.

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 17:35:24 -0400, "BenignVanilla"
wrote:

I lose circulation, and potentially my main pond would overflow about 1/2-1
inch of water as the bigger VF area drains down into the lower. I used to
have a check valve in place at the in-flow of the VF, but I recently took it
out.

My pump picks up from the filter, fed by the bottom drain and pumps to
the VF.
I drilled a 5/32" hole in the inlet pipe at about a 45 degree angle
to the flow just above the waterline of the VF. Works like a ventura
and allows a bit of air to enter the flow of water while the pump is
running and stops the siphon/backflow when the pump shuts down. I
have 1 1/2" black plastic pipe and 1800gph pump.

Regards,

Hal