[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Mike's wet/dry fry (send responses toallensandra at boatmans_com)
Allen"Boat" Boatman gave a nice description of Mike Jacobs' current set-up, which SKS members had the opportunity to see at the club meeting a few weeks ago (at Mike's house.)
I'll add that one of the really neat things about Mike's set-up, compared to the few other home "central filtration systems" I've seen, is that the individual tanks are NOT physically connected to the system plumbing, etc. The PVC elbow from the bulkhead fitting is about 6" long and the outgoing water just gravity drops into a rain gutter below. So you can easily pick up the tanks, move them around, wash them out, etc. I liked that flexibility.
The other thing that would presumably be pretty easy to do with this kind of set-up would be to put a UV-sterilizer in the water path on the return path from the external wet/dry filter box. I've never used one, but if/when I go to this kind of a centralized filtering system, I'd seriously consider using one, since (properly set-up so that the flow-rate is optimal) UV-sterilizers can really kick the foo out of many sorts of nefarious pathogens we'd rather not have. (See: "Aquatic Systems Engineering: Devices and How They Function", by Pedro Escobal & Martin Moe Jr.)
But that might be verging on overkill, clearly Mike's set-up "as is" is already tremendously effective.
They may not be killies (of course, he has those too), but seeing 200-odd thumbnail-sized black angelfish in a pristine 6 or 7 liter critter-keeper, obviously very healthy, is not only an impressive and fun thing to see, but it certainly makes you wonder "Gee, maybe this is a better technology that I should be trying too."
That's for sure what I'm thinking. (And it just occurred to me that the water collection gutters are just a pile of lava rocks away from being an additional part of the active filtration of this system.)
.02
Doug Dame
Interlachen FL
-----------------------------------------
"conveniently located between Palatka
and Gainesville. Well, convenient if you
happen to need to go from one of those
places to the other."
---------------
See http://www.aka.org/AKA/subkillietalk.html to unsubscribe