Stainless Steel Koi Shower Filter / Trickle Filter

Hello there, welcome back. In this video I'm going to be talking about this fella. This is a stainless steel, professionally made, koi shower filter system. Also known as a trickle tower or trickle system. This is the bee's knees as far as ammonia, nitrite and nitrate removal goes, providing the right media is used. Now if you're interested in getting one of these I will put the link to the Global Koi website in the video description and I'll also put other useful links in there as well so please click show more you'll get the full video description and there'll be a lot of useful information in there. Now this shower system is made of stainless steel and you remember that one I made a few videos ago the DIY one that was just a plastic box. Which is very functional but it doesn't look the best and it's quite easily damaged. You'll be hard pushed to damage this one. This one is going to last you a hell of a long time. It's quite an initial outlay to buy one but it's well worth it if you're thinking long term and you've got a big koi pond that you need to filter properly. I've spent a little bit of time looking for videos that are about shower filters on YouTube and believe it or not there isn't that many. Shower filters aren't a hugely popular idea and I can't understand why because they are possibly the most effective way of filtering the water in your pond and getting the best results as far as the chemical health of your water goes and what I'm hoping is that by putting this video out and by putting the previous one and hopefully future ones out about shower filters whether it be DIY Bye for now. Perfect water quality, very, very easily. Right, we've got the filter set up now, and in a moment I'll show you exactly what's in it. But hopefully you can hear that it's not epically noisy, probably about as noisy as a medium-sized stream coming back into your pond. Quite a nice soothing sound, actually. It's almost just like a waterfall, which, in effect, is what it is. Just a big waterfall coming down through some very porous rocks. Filtering the water and making it healthy. Now although the best media to put in here would be either the Biohome Ultra or the Maxi Ultimate, it's very expensive and I sell a lot of that. So I don't want to put a hell of a lot of that in here only for it to be unsaleable because I like to sell it totally unused. I'm not actually going to be using this on my pond because the pond is just too big for a filter of this size. I've nearly set this up to show you guys how a shower filter works. So with that in mind, I've set it up using pumice. There you go, one, two, three, four trays set up with 30 to 50 ml pumice and 25 kilograms of it in each one of these trays. Therefore, four trays equals 100 kilos. So you can see why I didn't set it up with BioHome, it would have cost me a fortune. It still cost me quite a lot to set this up, because I don't sell media that I've previously used, and even though the water going through here is pretty clean, I class this media now as used. So effectively, I've got 100 kilos of media, and I don't really have a use for it now, unless I make a filter for somebody's pond, which I may well do at a future date. Okay, in this particular one, all I've got is a bit of coarse sponge, followed by pumice. 25 kilos of pumice in each one of these trays so in total you've got 100 kilos of pumice in there and that would be capable of filtering a huge pond now there's a 16 000 liter an hour pump it's actually the Aquamax of my pond the one that i took out in the previous video so that's really cascading a hell of a lot of water down through that media and there's not a splash coming out see how dry the surrounding land is there Absolutely bone dry, with all being contained within the filter. No point having a shower filter if it throws water all over the place, because you're going to lose water from your pond. There you go, there's a typical bit of pumice. All different sorts of sizes of holes going right through it. Very porous rock, natural rock. And that will raise the pH a little bit and it'll mineralize the water, so it's pretty good for koi. Okay, so basically we've got the pump sitting on the bottom of the pond, pumping up to this rigid pipe. with an elbow and this basically just forms a spray bar two inch pipe with loads of holes drilled in water cascades out through the foams ideally you'd have coarse medium and fine foams possibly sacrificing the whole of the first tray um if you had no other filter apart from this you know have all your mechanical filtration done here then you're biological so the water comes through the spray bar through your foams through all the media in the various trays there And via a nice spillway, returns back to the pond. Let's turn that off for a moment whilst I'm talking to the camera, just so I don't have to shout. See how quickly the water drains out of that. It literally just showers through it and away back to the pond. Now this filter was made by a company called Global Koi. They're based in the UK and they supply shower filters to koi keepers all around the country. And I presume elsewhere in the world as well. I'll put the link to their website in the video description. Now this is very very well made as you've seen. Made of stainless steel, it's very solid, it holds a hell of a lot of media and really you get easily another 5 kilos in each one of these trays taking it up to about 120, 130 kilos which is a hell of a lot of media and they will make these filters to order as well. So you don't have to have them in this particular size, you can have them in any size you want. You can also have ones that fit into a corner as well, they don't have to be rectangular they can be triangular although that is apparently more difficult to make. Now that I've got this switched off I'll just quickly mention the fact that this spray bar is not actually fixed on, no fixings. It's simply prevented from sliding off by this bit of a knuckle here and the knuckle at the other side and when the water fills up this pipe it becomes really heavy, just keeps it in place I'm just absolutely gutted that I've got to give this back. And also, I'm equally gutted that I don't have a pond suitable for this filter. My pond is absolutely massive and this just wouldn't do the job. I've given up trying to think of ways to filter my pond. It's just not going to happen. It's far too big. But if I had a koi pond, I would be badgering them to keep a hold of this. It really is an excellent filter. Now, this can be used as the only filter. You know, as I mentioned before, if you pack this top section out with foams, that does all your mechanical filtration and then you use good filter media in your remaining trays you'll get a really good mechanical filtration and an excellent biological filtration and if you're using something like pumice or the bio home you stand a very good chance of completing the nitrogen cycle most filters will only half do the cycle they'll convert ammonia to nitrite and nitrite to to nitrate. That is a huge problem with the likes of the Nexus filters that use the moving beds and the K1 plastic media. Plastic media really only supports aerobic bacteria. So they do the job of consuming ammonia and nitrite and they become a nitrate factory. Imagine sticking one of these after your Nexus filter. That is the perfect setup for one of these fellas. Because with good media in here, the likes of your pumice and especially your biohome, They support anaerobic bacteria as well as aerobic bacteria and the anaerobic bacteria processes the nitrate so you end up with that full cycle of filtration being completed and when the nitrate is processed it's processed into soluble nitrogen that's taken up by the plants in the pond or it simply bubbles off into the atmosphere. All right let's turn this back on and we'll see how long it takes from the time the water starts piling in the top to when it comes out the bottom, I bet it won't be long, about eight seconds from when it started coming the top to when it's coming out the bottom full force and what you're probably thinking is hold on I want the water to spend more than eight seconds in a filter, well it does because if you use porous media as the water's flowing through some of it is getting drawn into the media it's traveling through all those tiny little tunnels in the media where all the bacteria live and They're doing a great job of consuming ammonia, nitrite and if you use the right media, nitrate. So whilst the majority of water does just pile through in eight seconds, much of it does get drawn in and it spends a lot longer than that in the filter. Some of it might take 10 minutes, some might take an hour. Some might take a hell of a lot longer than that if it gets into a piece of media that's not as porous as other ones if it gets in it kind of gets locked in an anaerobic zone then it slowly trickles out into another piece slowly trickles out into another piece just because you've got water piling down over it doesn't mean to say that there's not going to be any anaerobic activity that is key using the good media getting that anaerobic Aerobic bacteria, even in a really fast flow, is possible and these do it very, very well. Okay, we'll just have a quick run through some of the various options that we've got for filter media for the shower filters. And we're going to start with something called Crystal Biowool. Now, as far as I can gather, it's a sintered glass, but it's made by adding, I think, bicarbonate of soda to the mix, getting it all fluffed up, and then allowing it to either set or putting it in a kiln. It creates a very porous structure, it's extremely light, certainly easily the lightest of these particular medias, and it's got a very good surface area. One problem is, it's pretty soft, and I think it's going to wear pretty quickly. See, I've just cracked the bit off there very, very easily, and you can see inside, it's got that very good honeycomb structure all the way through it, but it is soft. It's a bit of a drawback. So I would maybe recommend that one for very low flow filters, where it's more or less just dripping through. You don't want a fast flow going through that. Next one up is a ceramic media called Alpha Grog. And as far as I can gather, this is actually a by-product, or it's made from a by-product from the foundry process. And this works very, very well in pond filters, especially in dirty environments. But it's got nowhere near the available surface area of really any of the other ones I'm going to be showing you. That's a good one, though. It's a very good budget one. If you weren't looking to spend massive amounts of money on your pond filter, that would be the one I would say go for. Very cheap. Got a good structure. Very, very hard. I can't break that. That's going to last a long, long time in your shower filter. Next one up is a very, very good quality white pumice. This is a natural volcanic rock with a specific pH of around 8. So it's actually perfect for koi. It's reasonably hard and it's got a very varied structure. In that some of the holes are big, some of them are very small, but each piece is useful, with it being a good quality one. You can get lower quality ones and they're actually, I'll not give the trade names of them because they're not specified as being pumice, but there is quite a few different products marketed as something special which are basically just pumice. And sadly, they aren't the quality of this drinking-water quality pumice. So that's a bit of a bummer. They're way more expensive as well. I sell a load of this stuff to people with shower filters because it works very, very well. It supports quite a lot of anaerobic as well as aerobic bacteria. So you can get the full cycle occurring within this media, which will result in the reduction of nitrate. And it's a good economical alternative to the next one that I'm going to show you. This is another sintered glass one, this is Biohome Ultra, and it's also got a variant, which is called Biohome Maxi Ultimate. Basically, they're exactly the same size, same porosity, but this one has added trace elements, which, to be honest, is more important for indoor systems, where you're not going to get the build-up of trace elements naturally. However, with those added trace elements, it does allow the media to set up exceptionally fast with aerobic and anaerobic bacteria. See the structure there? It's a mixture of big holes and little holes, and those tunnels run right through it. So providing the water is clean when it hits this, it'll support more aerobic and anaerobic bacteria than pretty much anything else. These two are very expensive to use in a shower filter. I don't sell much of this for people with shower filters, and when I do, it tends to be for people who really know the filtration and have very expensive fish and want the absolute best quality water for them. Yes, I have missed out a blatantly obvious one, and that is the Bucky House media. It's a very good media, but it's very expensive, and at the moment, I don't actually have any of that at hand. I'll show you pictures of it. It's a ceramic media. To me, it's got one unfortunate feature, and that is, it's basically just an elongated tube. The middle of it's missed out. It's been taken out. And that's where your anaerobic zone would be. That's where your anaerobic bacteria would be converting the nitrate to nitrogen. Soluble nitrogen gassing off, that's missing, so it's going to support a hell of a lot of aerobic bacteria which is going to process ammonia and nitrite, not so much anaerobic bacteria and really that's what we're looking for, we're looking for something that's going to provide the full cycle, it's going to process ammonia, nitrite and nitrate because the last thing you want to be doing is huge water changes when you've just spent £1,000, £2,000, maybe even more on a huge filter. You want those water changes to be minimal, you want nitrate to be at a very, very low level so that your fish grow big. Basically, having no ammonia, no nitrite and very low nitrate tricks your fish into thinking that they're in a bigger space than they are, so they eat and eat and eat and they grow much bigger. So I'm not saying that the Bucky House media is bad, it is very good media, it's exceptionally well made, I just wish that they hadn't have made it into a tube, if it was solid it would be a really, really awesome media. Now you'll notice that there was no plastic media in there at all, that's basically because plastic media... Unless it's in a moving bed and all those pieces are crashing together and supporting a very, very hardy bacteria is useless. You do not want plastic media unless it's in a moving bed. If it's in a static bed filter... It simply hasn't got the surface area or the porosity, it's got no porosity, it basically has got none of the things that we're looking for, for supporting a huge amount of bacteria, so I've just absolutely discounted plastic media from this video. Obviously the pumice is a natural stone, not many places in the world have that just lying around, so you're probably going to have to buy it, and there are a couple of alternatives, no actually there's three alternatives. Obviously, you've got the expensive branded stuff that isn't called pumice. But it's basically just a reasonable, mediocre quality pumice. You've got proper pumice, used for filtering drinking water and so on. And then you've got the darker forms of pumice, which would generally be used in landscaping projects, decorative rocks and all that sort of thing. They tend to contain a lot of iron, so not many folks do use those in koi ponds and so on. But they're quite popular as a DIY media for aquariums, especially if you don't want the pH to be elevated like it would be using the white pumice. Now the darker forms of pumice tend to have a more open structure than the lighter forms of pumice, i.e. the white forms, which makes them not as ideal but certainly pretty good and they are very cheap as well, so that might be another one to check out. Obviously in an aquarium environment where space is often an issue you'd probably not bother with the darker forms of pumice. you'd go for something more specific like a really good ceramic media or a good sintered glass media. Now ultimately which type of media you decide to use in your shower filter will purely depend on what you're willing to spend. The Biohome Ultra and the Maxi Ultimate is the Rolls-Royce of medias but it's very expensive. If you're not looking to spend that much maybe step it down to the Pumice if you've got a Koi pond, perfectly suitable for that. If you're not looking to spend as much as Such as that, step it down to the alpha grog. It's still very good and if you're not worried about the media wearing fairly quickly, Then, as long as you've got a low flow, maybe consider the Crystal Bio. All those forms of media, including the Baccy House media, will do a very, very good job. Certainly better than your standard multi-base static bed filters. So there you go, that's the shower filter. I have done previous videos about shower filters, but this one is one of the proper, commercially available stainless steel shower filters. This is basically going to last a lifetime. So, check them out, read up more about them, don't just take my word for anything, certainly check out other types of media as well, I'm not a fountain of knowledge when it comes to anything like that, I can merely just report on what I know about, and what I've tried, and what works well, so don't take my word as gospel at all, just do your research, but definitely consider them if you've got a koi pond. Installing a shower filter after something like a Nexus, which is basically just a nitrate factory, would be a perfect way to bring the nitrate down and complete that cycle, make the water excellent for your fish. If you want to see how to make your own DIY shower filter, click the link in the video description. I did a video about that a while ago and it seems to have gone down quite well. But if you want a proper one built, the likes of that one there, check out the guys from Global Koi. The link to their website is in the video description. It really could have been explained how this thing works in about five seconds. Water goes in the top, through foams, through media, back to pond. Simple as that. Apologies if I've taken a little bit longer than that to explain how this works and show you, but hopefully you've enjoyed the video. If you have, click the thumbs up, share it wherever you want, and I shall see you in the next video.