Shutting Down Bio Filter For Winter?

[JohnHuff]

Hi:
Ya, you may be right. I was having a bad day when I answered his post. Another day I might have brushed it off, but that's him. I notice it when he replies to other people as well. And his sig(!), it's almost like preemptive sarcasm. I still remember my very 2nd post on this forum was to tell him to shut up!

But on your last post, you don't HAVE to use bacteria house media for a Bakki shower. i don't think Bakki is a tradename associated with one vendor's material. If it is, it's like everyone saying I need a Tylenol but just meaning any pain killer will do.

It does. I did a lot of read up on Bakki's when I built my own. A lot of people may call their filter a Bakki, but it really isn't. I refer to my filter as a Bakki shower as well when I talk about it but it's really just a shower filter.

 

[Sunshine]

For water clarity the bog would be the better of the two to leave up and running. I leave all running unless there is for sure going to be a hard freeze, but I'm far further south. If you do decide to shut down the Bio clean the bio material as good as possible with clean water. Store dry where it can not come in contact with chemicals and won't allow for mold or mildew. Rinse again in the spring before putting back in use. Be surprised how easy some types can collect dust, chemical residue, and mildew through a winter.

After cleaning the bio balls and mats and emptying the filter, could I store them in the filter for the Winter?

 

[Craig58]

After cleaning the bio balls and mats and emptying the filter, could I store them in the filter for the Winter?

I wouldn't see why not. As long as you don't leave water sitting in it.

Craig

 

[Sunshine]

I wouldn't see why not. As long as you don't leave water sitting in it.

Craig

Great .. thanks

 

[crsublette]

However if your bio filter is something like a Bakki Shower then ammonia removal by outgassing is significant.

I've read that this is a myth and there is no outgassing. What references do you have?

In regards to the outgassing, I read a chemist on koiphen or koi-bito literally broke down the entire equation helping to portray how much ammonia outgassing actually occurs. I hope I kept it. The degassing only occurs at high volume, with minimal surface area, if there is actually a very high volume of ammonia. However, ammonia levels in ponds are relatively quite low. So, you would need a huge shower tower and high flow rate to accomplish any measureable ammonia degassing when talking about < 1 ppm of ammonia. Ugh, it's in my bookmark library of 100 or so hyperlinks, which I have not gotten around to organizing; I hope I remembered to bookmark.

Last I checked, you can not even buy the Bacteria House media anywhere here else since a proprietary media only sold by particular distributors. I think the closest I could find was something called "feathered stone". Supposedly, big deal about Bacteria House is the FIR (Focused Infra Ray) that is suppose to zap, dissipating, the dissolved organic matter and this is how it is sold why the medium reduces nitrates the best. Heh, very heated debates regarding the FIR; even JR, which appears to be somewhat of a believer, has been forced to show a bit of humility on the subject.

Huge flow through systems are utilized with all of the Bakki Shower systems I have read about. I am talking huge.

On Koi Bito, I have read people literally paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for an "authentic" Bakki Shower so they could post their results about its nitrate reducing abilities. Never much ever came from the threads.

 

[crsublette]

Google "ammonia outgassing" will provide lots of info on how and when ammonia will outgas. For specific tests on Bakki I think Birdman's "New Test Tank" thread is pretty good. But since you consider this a myth I'm sure you'll also be able to find enough info there to support that view too.

Yeah, I think the outgassing occured quite well until it got to the very low volumes of ammonia thus creating the nitrites and nitrates in two instances. The third instance of ammonia and nitrites was when his fish did something to the auto feeder, that dumped a ton of feed in the water, but this was corrected very fast with a little help from him increasing the flow through to 60gph for a short duration and I bet there was very noticeable ammonia degassing due to the shotgun jump into some heavy ammonia from the dumped feed.

I think two big items to note is his flow rate, that was 2000gph per sq foot surface area, and he had a very small flow through.

Aweomse Waterbug. Thanks for sharing the Birdman hyperlink. Very very nice. Good stuff.