How would you do your filter

[BennyLava]

How would you do your "doc" poultry netting bio filter, if you needed to link 2 barrels together? My pond is large enough that I actually need 2 barrels. But I don't think I can just let the water run out of the top of one barrel, into the top of the next barrel. You wouldn't get that swirling action that way. My pump flows 2400 GPH, which is about how many gallons my pond is. So, should I just run a splitter and route the water into both barrels at the same time? Then have the water join together again when its leaving the barrels?

 

[koiguy1969]

run them parellel like you mentioned ...1200 gph to each barrel..its more efficient than runing them series anyways. and 1200gph is about the norm for flow rate as well.

 

[BennyLava]

Only thing is, you need a lid for each barrel to maintain the water pressure, don't you? I don't know where I'm going to come across affordable plasic barrels with lids that can be taken off and put back on, that make a tight enough seal to maintain water pressure. Cause I need it to flow back up hill (about 2 feet) in order to have it run down my waterfall. Guess I could always just delete my waterfall for now...

 

[DrCase]

Can you just raise the filters ?
So you could gravity feed back to the pond

 

[BennyLava]

Yeah that would work just fine. Only thing is, I built the pond without the knowledge of ever needing bio filters, and it would look pretty odd. Due to the way I have the waterfall set up. But I may just have to rig something like that up and hide it with some big bushes or something. Perhaps some kind of weird little "house" to go over the barrels? Any of you guys ever thought of doing something like that? Also my pump is a submersible pump (Laguna brand) and it has to stay in the water. So that puts a couple of limitations too I think.

 

[taherrmann4]

I have a small house for my external pump, they only reason I did this is b/c my pump has to stay out of the weather. For your situation I would be more inclined to use some ornamental grasses to hide it or a small bush. Do you have a pic of the area you are talking about might help us be able to come up with some ideas for you.

 

[Shdwdrgn]

I also run two 55-gal barrels, and set mine up so that they spill into either side of the top of the waterfall. A bit of black spray paint or a mound of dirt does a good job of making the barrels less noticeable, and next year I plan on planting vines and tall grasses around the barrels to make them really blend in.

If you get the chance, I would recommend getting a second pump, and run one pump for each barrel. The biggest advantage of this is that if you have a failure in one pump, there is no emergency in trying to get it replaced right away, but of course it also simplifies the plumbing.

A single 2400gph pump for a 2400-gallon pond? Seems way too slow to me. I like water flow - I have two 2900gph Laguna pumps running on my 1400-gallon pond.

 

[DrCase]

My drums sit behind a fence and gravity feed back 40ft to my upper pond

 

[Shdwdrgn]

I don't think my neighbors would appreciate me putting my barrels 'behind' the fence!

 

[BennyLava]

I also run two 55-gal barrels, and set mine up so that they spill into either side of the top of the waterfall. A bit of black spray paint or a mound of dirt does a good job of making the barrels less noticeable, and next year I plan on planting vines and tall grasses around the barrels to make them really blend in.

If you get the chance, I would recommend getting a second pump, and run one pump for each barrel. The biggest advantage of this is that if you have a failure in one pump, there is no emergency in trying to get it replaced right away, but of course it also simplifies the plumbing.

A single 2400gph pump for a 2400-gallon pond? Seems way too slow to me. I like water flow - I have two 2900gph Laguna pumps running on my 1400-gallon pond.

The general rule of thumb is to circulate your entire body of water in 1 hour. More than that is supposed to be too much and the animals don't really like it.

 

[koiguy1969]

the general rule of thumb is to 'filter' your ponds water volume once an hour... circulate as much as you want. but, IMHO, 2900 gph is way to much flow for a 55 gal drum filter. 1000 - 1200 gph is about what most of us put thru ours. 1000 gph is 16.66 gpm so you get alittle over 3 minutes of hang time in your filter for biological filtration...2900 gph is 48.33 gpm giving you just over 1 minute in filtration..thats not much time for the aerobic bacteria to work.and the faster flow of water makes it even harder for the bacteria to work on top of that....now thats just my opinion...
side note....i run one 1200 gph pump thru my 70 gal filter and another 1000gph pump 'venturied' into the surface water in my filter for circulation and aeration. my pond is 1200 gals.

 

[Shdwdrgn]

I was actually thinking about this last night... It would be simple enough to add a diverter at the top of the barrel so that part of the water is pushed through the filter, and the rest just spills out the top for the waterfall. After considering a lot of the other chat I've read around here, there's been times that I thought this may be exactly the reason why I have such a problem with the filters not handling the algae in the early Summer.

To make matters worse, my original pond had a 3000gph pump pushing through a 25-gallon skippy. Of course the entire pond was only about 250 gallons, so it didn't take a lot to keep that one clear.

 

[Shdwdrgn]

That turned out to be really easy! I added a T to the top, with one end pointed down into the top of the barrel. Surprisingly, a lot of water still moves down through the filter and bubbles back up again, and I can adjust the amount of diverted water just by rotating the angle of the new T. It's too late this year to know what the affect will be, but next Spring we'll see if I still have so much trouble with the algae bloom.

 

[addy1]

Neat idea! an easy fix

 

[BennyLava]

Guess in the end, those are my three options. Either put another pump in line, get some barrels with sealable lids, or let it gravity feed somehow.