…and I declared I wanted a storebought filter for my b’day, please. I’ve ordered a Matala mechanical filter. It’s got a uv filter I don’t want to use, because having had 3 of them catch fire and damage expensive equipment, I’m not real keen on the use of same. But it’s about like one of those Rubbermaid fliptop storage bins in size with a sequence of gradated internal filter pads that fills the whole box and will do some meaningful filtering. No backflush option. But at least some filters that get way down in grade.
The pond is 5000 gallons, with koi that are getting bigger. You can pretty well double the filtration of a pond with large koi, so this one is behaving like a 10,000 pond that has no fish; and adding a second potent filter for the duration of the summer season will definitely help.
This has not been the usual year. We have never had a problem like this—whether it’s the growing koi, or even some local increase of co2: this season has had some varieties of weed growing like mad in our garden, and we’ve been run ragged trying to keep up with the problems—which have not existed in prior years. Maybe it’s the location of the jet stream. Solar output, during the height of solar max. Or it’s just a local cycle. Whatever it is, we’ve got wild vegetable growth. SHould be bumper crops in the agricultural zones, this year, but man, those octopus-like, ground-covering weeds are driving us crazy.
How did the sand filter splode? Well, I set it all up, and bent over filling it, and I think I got spiderbit under my chin: I was way down in the garbage can thingie I was using, and now have a nasty bite that itches like mad.
And we thought for a moment we had it working, because all the plumbing was going and the pump balance (inflow to filtering speed) was near perfect even without choke valves.
And it was a wrestling match. I got all the oversized (2″ hose) plumbing in and working—and we were perfect—
And then the makeshift gasket failed and dumped a lot of sand into the pond. We yanked the plug. Now I have a pond murky with sand-dust. Elementary engineering mistake: I was fine until the weight of sand and water and the force of the 2000 gph pump exceeded the strength of the walls of the container: they bowed, the gasket failed, and at 94 degrees with 50% humidity out there, plus the spider bite, I was just a little p.o.’ed.
Economic Design flaw. I cannot get a sufficiently large rigid-walled tank that I can also move about without spending too much…so best pack it in during the test phase before we’ve spent too much, and order a filter that’s less efficient in principle, but that can be an asset, with water as dirty as koi can get it. I have this vision of a really efficient sand filter that builds up pressure real fast, and either has to be constantly tended, or that (if a commercial one) blows out its spendy gaskets at the rate of one a week, or that has to be packed with coarse gravel that doesn’t work as well.
Well, if this were easy, we’d make a mint selling the patented design, eh? So I’m going with the Matala design and hoping it tames the algae monster this year and next.
Sounds like a problem a wine-making buddy & I had: strength of materials. 😉
We had a few jugs go “skunky”, and I got the idea that if we bubbled CO2 through them, it could carry off some of the gas, and since CO2 is heavier than air and produced by fermentation anyway, it would have no deleterious effect on the wine.
Jim rigged up several different plastic containers with tubes for the attachment of Tygon tubing to go down the jugs.
The jugs are only about 30″ tall, so the pressure at the bottom is less than 8% greater than atmospheric. That was expected to have been no particular problem. They all blew out! 🙁
He finally solved that using a pressure cooker, and attaching the tubing to the pressure-relief nipple at the top. And it worked. 🙂 It didn’t become a good wine, but it was drinkable.
Life is full of stuff. I mailed some sourdough starter to a friend in upstate NY. One cup of starter, added to that 2 cups of flour and 2/3 cup of dry milk – ti was a fairly solid dough. Split it between two 2-cup air-tight snap-lid containers, each in a zip-top bag, and both of those in a larger zip-top bag. Mailed it priority on Wednesday evening, it was delivered yesterday, and I have been informed that the stuff got out of the containers, out of the smaller bags, and had not yet escaped from the larger bag.
Well, it certainly proved it was alive.
At least it wasn’t sending out signals yet.
“Surrender and prepare to be eaten!”
^ Not what you want to hear over ship’s com! :LOL:
That beats my story of the Unfortunate Banana Bread Incident, wherein my grandmother did not realize that mailing her grandson a loaf of banana bread, sent to the Bryan post office instead of College Station, without informing her college-age grandson, would not therefore get the dessert to him while it was still, ah, fresh. My roommate and I declared it a fine and loving gesture, and threw it out. I am very sure she did not send it in the condition in which we found it when opened! But hey, the biology majors could’ve had fun with the mold…. Eek. The call to apologize to my grandmother and correct several assumptions regarding mail to me, was…awkward. (Where to mail, to get the post office nearest me, was simple. If it was food, to please tell me, because I didn’t check my box daily, was more tricky.)
Lol!
Indeed! 🙂
Reminds me of an old saying: “Ecology is what you get when you’re not looking!”
I say in my ‘I’m a Mother’ voice, “Let Jane keep an eye on that wound. Bites are not to be ignored”!
I will. 😉
CJ, you said you were using a garbage can for your sand receptacle? Is it plastic, well, I would presume, since galvanized steel isn’t going to seal up like a plastic can’s lid locks do. Unless the friction holding the galvanized lid onto the top of the can is enough to withstand the pressure of the water streaming through. If you drill 4 holes at equal angles around the vertical edge of the lid, hook a small S-hook into each hole, attach one end of a piece of wire rope or similar sturdy line to one S-hook and the other end to a turnbuckle, and the turnbuckle to the opposite S-hook (having two lines crossing at the bottom), you could use the turnbuckle to adjust the tension on the lid, and when you needed to get into the receptacle, loosen the turnbuckles, slip them off the S-hooks, and lift the lid. Hmmmm…..a plastic can bows out, so would you be able to reinforce it by wrapping it in something like chicken wire or a slightly heavier mesh? You could use zip-ties to join the ends to get them as snug as you could. Or, there are straps that have an adjustable buckle that you could wrap around the can and pull tight to hold the can to shape. I don’t know if you’d find those straps in the automotive section at say, Wal-Mart, but it would be a starting place to look.
Of course, if the sand container in question is neither plastic nor galvanized, I don’t have any ready suggestions.
It’s plastic. And I did think about wire-wrapping it, and thanks, Joe. It’s a good idea. But…I went ahead and ordered the other thing, which should be easier to deal with, so I’m kind of committed to that.
And the bite, whatever it is, is responding to Benedryl spray, so not a hobo spider.
“A hobo spider…?” she inquires from distant New England.
a nasty local to Washington and Oregon… a lot like a fiddleback/recluse, but not. If the recluse gets up here, the hobo and recluse are going to have to battle it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo_spider
That her?