Make your pond filter easy to hide, low cost to build
Discover how to make small yet powerful pond filters ... ""Supra"" pond filter biomedia is the secretThe choice of a pond filter biomedia is critical to the health of your fish pond. In the biomedia of a fish pond filter, bacteria colonies work to purify the water. The better the biofilter, the smaller your homemade pond filter needs to be. And don't worry, pond filters are relatively easy to make. The first consideration when building a fish pond filter is SSA, or specific surface area. See the chart below, where SSA is measured in square feet per gallon of different pond filter biomedia. A high number here is best. For example, if an SSA is 1, then an SSA of 8 will hold enough surface area to contain 8 times as many important bacteria inside a pond filter. Pond filter biomediaYou can use SSA to classify all biomedia that can be used in a fish pond filter, or bio filters of any type. Just remember that the higher the SSA, the more probable that the biomedia in your fish pond filter will be effective in keeping your water clean and healthy. SSA is a measurement of surface area per unit volume of a type of biomedia that is available for colonization by bacteria -- in this case, bacteria living inside a fish pond filter. If your building your own pond filter, and you're using a products like simple plastic tubes, your SSA can be easily calculated because this is a simple shape and a smooth surface. If you run the calculations, you will find that the SSA is roughly 40 square feet per gallon of biomedia. This is another way of saying that if your fish pond filter is filled with plastic tubes, then for every gallon used, about 40 square feet of surface is provided for colonization by the bacteria. The table below says you need 45 times more Plastic than "Supra", 18 times more foam than "Supra" and about 5 and a half times more Lava Rock as "Supra" to get same biological activity or effect. Taking this to a more practical level the container required to hold the plastic media would need to be 45 times larger than the one holding "Supra" ... so you can see that "Supra" enables small filters to be made ... yet these filters are packed with lots of bacteria and thus cleansing ability. These smaller filter also take up less space which means you can hide them more easily
Some important bacterial considerations concerning pond filter biomediaTo determine the amount of bacteria required to keep water clean and healthy in your fish pond, consider the following:
It is easy to see that the higher the SSA inside a home built fish pond filter, the better it will function in providing clean, healthy water for your fish. But KEEP IN MIND that it's the biomedia SSA, combined with the flow rates and concentrations that determines the size of a pond filter or biofilter box, and NOT the size of your pond. Few if any of the retailers in your area will know this, so don't be misled when shopping for a pond filter box. Most retailers go by the wrong assumption, and sell big pond filter boxes for large ponds, and small boxes for smaller ponds. But this is misleading at best. In practice, a small fish pond filter box will work quite well for a large pond as long as the biomedia is selected carefully, and the outlet from the box is large enough to allow water flow out at the same rate that water is being pumped into the box. If you're building your own biofilter, and you're short of space, this secret will allow you to make a fish pond filter that's adequate for your needs. Now don't confuse biofilters with UV filters. A UV filter, when used in pond filters applications, is designed to remove the green, pea-soup appearance to your pond water. UV filters do not purify the water in the way that a biofilter does. But UV filters are often used in conjunction with biofilters, so that your pond water is crystal clear as well as clean and healthy for your fish. You can save time and money by installing both at the same time. A Cyprio pond filter, like most other types, can be improved by the selection of good pond filter media as well as changing existing pond media. Or you can suppliment your existing media with a high efficiency pond media like "Supra". WARNING ... If you ever decide to change filter media do not take out the old and replace immediately by the new ... do this gradually over a period of weeks since all the old media will have the working bacteria and the new media will need time to get colonized. See the pond filter and feeding your fish pages for more on keeping your pond water clean and healthy. You can buy "Supra" and filters containing "Supra" in USA here ... just click the link |
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