PlanetCatfish.com

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Still a fascinating journey. I might just have to make a trip to Florida one of these days.

NCE12940 wrote:Still a fascinating journey. I might just have to make a trip to Florida one of these days.

That is what I think every time I check in to this thread.

Jools

What a massive build. Looks like it is moving along. A few opinions and thoughts;

Shade cloth, in my experience raising fish outside in greenhouses i find the Florida summer heat is brutal. I have a mix of 30% & 50% shade and feel that is not enough. Some of my vats in the greenhouse kept near 85F most of the summer. When i get the money and energy I would like to swap out for 80% or higher.

Sump, the sump is a great idea. It is always nice to have extra water volume and easy access to your system. You can place other equipment in there to hide from the main tank or tanks. For biological filtration I have found that a fluidized bed filter to be superb. You get great surface area for bacteria. The key is to get a coarse grade of sand so it does not become a rock when shut off. Something the size of aragonite but not aragonite since anything calcium will dissolve away. I have tried some gravel at the bottom as well to prevent a clog. You dont need as much sand as most people will tell you. Depending on the diameter of the tower you only need a few inches of sand. Once it is floating a couple of feet you get a massive bio filter.

Thanks guys for your interest, good wishes, and suggestions.

Small update. I bought the pumps - twenty Aquasurge 5000's, so will try to use just one pump type for all my needs. Submersible (quiet), asynchronous drive, 360 W, 5300 GPH at 0' of head, ~5000 GPH at ~5', which is ~ where I am.

Also, got a 500 gal PE water tank from Craiglist to use as a mechanical pre-filter or an analog of an aquasock. Drilled 1.5" holes.

Will line with two layers of the Poly-Flo green 1" medium density mechanical filtration pad (got a 56" x 120' roll). Not sure if this will pass through 30,000 GPH (15,000 GPH, three pumps per each 4500 gal tank) but will have to play with it. Can raise the pre-filter higher with blocks (the sump is 5' deep) and/or take out one pad layer. The idea is to rinse the pad 1-2 times a week right inside the pre-filter and vacuum the muck out. If does not work, take the pad out, rinse, and reinstall.

Four more pre-filters for other exhibits are planned to be made, probably the same way. There will be lots of PE shavings from the drilling. I am thinking of using the shavings as media for bio-filtration.

Oct 27, 2014. Have been plumbing the 4500's and filling them gradually over a week letting the tanks and the stands adjust slowly. Never mind the tannin-stained water - I am using straight well water for testing and plumbing purposes. When all holds, will switch to mainly RO + some well water.

Wow - I wish I could do a project like this. Good luck and look forward to watching this develope. For everyone who would love to do this and can't for various reasons please keep us updated.

Nov 10, 2014. Thank you all guys for support.

A major milestone. The 4500's are full and running. Pumped down two outside ponds and transferred the tropicals and Co inside as the nights and the water temp outside are getting too cold.

The tank water is still colored yellow (plus blue paint produces green appearance). Tannin. Still at about 30% raw well water and 70% RO. Hopefully, in a few weeks it will be about colorless and the turbidity will subside too. Both also dim the lighting.

Need much better lighting for good photos. Just some quick and dirty for now. With a flash (one included) the pics are far better but have no depth, of course, as all gets blacked out in the background.

I have to get an upper hand on the parasites. Even an ~15 min ~10-20 ppm KMnO4 potassium permanganate soak has not killed all external bugs, it appears, as the fish are rubbing somewhat. The internal are being addressed through water (metro + prazi currently) and hopefully through food in a week or so. Need a good Epsom salt cleanse too. Have not had the time to quarantine. November has been unusually cool this year.

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The other 4500:

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With a flash:

Amazing!

No question that I'm going to have to make a trip to Florida!

Nov 13, 2014. Thanks guys! You might have to wait a bit though...

Well, you aim for best but get the usual. The first iteration was short-lived and blew up in my face. Nov 12 around 4 am, the 15,000 gal sump / water reserve caved in. I walked into the fish room flooded to the ankle, silt in the tanks, one tank overflowing, the other half full, ~700 cinder blocks fallen inside the sump, and a mud and ground slide too.

Based on evidence, my view of what happened is that my home-made plug-resistant drain grate was not nearly resistant enough. 15,000 GPH in a 4" drain create quite a suction. A fish was unable to free itself from it. A smaller fish. I had previously observed larger fish to overcome this without a significant effort. (Of course, if a fish died, any fish, the sad result would have been the same.)

The water has been overflowing for some hours and some of it found its way around the sump, weakening the ground. The six 5000 GPH pumps eventually pumped out ~80% of water and then, when the water pressure from the inside of the sump got too small, the collapse of the sump walls, the mud slide, and the falling of the blocks inside occurred.

The blocks have been just stacked up in 5 layers (6th layer in ground), no posts or rebar, etc. just some filled with dirt - I had built it to never give in to the water pressure and to always have a minimum water level inside the sump to keep it from caving in. Bad thinking. Haste and cutting corners makes waste... sometimes.

Would not be the first time. If God is willing, we shall keep tinkering. Just a learning experience which set us back by a few weeks and some $$.

Rehomed the fish. Pulled out the blocks, the shade cloth (1500'x10' for biomedia), the shade cloth weights, etc. Need to get the liner out and the underlayment, shovel out the mud and begin again. Now with posts and braces.

Also, I experimented with using economical, thin-wall, PE, flexible, corrugated drainage pipes for both incoming (4" each pipe - one for each 5000 GPH pump) and draining water (6" pipe for each tank). My water pressures are all less than 3 psi. 6' of water is 3 psi for reference.

While it works well for the incoming part, it's not worth it for the draining part. Lots of pluses but the minuses are just terrible. Besides, I've learned there is a good chance I can make it work with a 4" drain, not 6". For reference, my 5000 GPH pump fills only ~30%-40% of the 4” corrugated pipe cross section. So I'll switch out to 4" PVC. 4" PVC is far cheaper than 6" too.

(Oh yeah, sadly, lost some fish too.)

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Incoming pipes - six 4" corrugated pipes. The pipes come up sharply and then slope down very gently and have a hole in each at the highest point to prevent both filling up (too much weight) and siphoning water out when turned off.

6" drain pipes:

Sorry to hear of the minor setback (as that's all it is in a project as big as yours). Perhaps a "cage" around the drain will prevent this from happening in the future? Preventing contact with the immediate space around the drain should alleviate the suction problem.

Sorry to hear about your set back. It is tough to consider all the possibilities until some of them happen.

That is a huge amount of weight to try to hold together. What other options are you looking at for a sump?

Thank you, guys. As stated, I am thinking of putting up wooden posts or poles and tying them overhead with each other with braces. Also pondering about starting with blocks from the very bottom and not from the top of the berm around the pond as it had been made before, or attaching pressure treated plywood sheets to the posts, or rebar, etc. I am pondering whether to let the banks slope some and not make them ~vertical as the last time, since I decided not to "hang" the shade cloth biomedia but to spread it around randomly.

Originally, I was looking for an above ground pool that I thought I could dig into the ground ~1.5' but I failed to find the right size, the right kind, and the right price on Craigslist, etc. I needed no liner, just the form. New are too expensive and would be rather a waste in my crude application. I was looking at a bunch of hard wall pools, having looked and considered and discarded the soft wall ones.

Hey Mats you are wrong, about breaking aquarium glass! (Earlier Post)

It is very easy to break an aquarium glass. I had a 55 gallon all set up, actually 3 in a row and I needed to take the end tank out! I emptied it completely and tried to jockey it out of position. I nicked the corner of the next tank with the empty one, the fully loaded tank with fish and water,"EXPLODED" all over the fish room hit my leg and cut it up badly. I wasn't standing right in front of it so I don't know what the results would have been, if I was but I was lucky anyways. I saved all the fish except one which went under a counter and I didn't find him for about a week later. I was sweeping glass and gravel up for at least a month after that!

Ron

And so iteration #2 has been underway...

Painstakingly slow progress.

Have started fillin'er back up...

Finished the pipe work for the most part. Still working on producing 25,000 gal of RO water to fill the filter and the two 4500's. The mechanical filter is in with 50' of 1" x 5' medium density pad. Shade cloth (for bio media) and its weights are in. The outside of the filter "dome" is ~ finished.

Filter is at ~4' of 6' max at the moment:

6" PE drain pipe was hard to work with and perhaps not reliable long term. Needless to say it is not meant for such an application but I had tried. So I've switched to 4" PVC. IDK yet if it will pass through 15,000 gal an hour needed. Soon will know. 2 pipes, 2 tanks.

Drain screens.

Gen 1 was made of a threaded 4" clean out cover. Found only slightly clog resistant and, as such, utterly insufficient.

Gen 2 is made of a 4" clean out tee plus two end caps plus a home-made nipple to convert tee's female end to male. The area of 100 1" holes is 6.2 times larger than that of a 4" pipe opening. Yet, remains to see how it fairs.

Amazed by this project !!

Redtailrob wrote:Amazed by this project !!

And a fascinating project as well!