Outdoor Aquarium Update May 2016

Well, the beast is operational. Extremely mucky, I didn't even bother cleaning the sides and I didn't even bother putting clean water in it. I've pumped water straight out of the pond so it's mature, albeit cloudy, water and I'm going to give it a few days and see if the filter can actually clear the water. Now you might recognise this. This is three parts of the shower filter that I built in a previous video a couple of weeks ago. Now there's a small pond pump that sits right in the back of the aquarium and that's pumping water into here. At the minute it's doing maybe 1500 litres an hour but it is turned down a little bit. It's just a spare one I had lying around and in fact it's almost 20 years old. It was one of the first Oase pumps to come into the country. Very small thing. Still quite economical even 20 years ago. So that's running my filter and apart from the water dropping into the tank, Very, very quiet. You can barely hear the water flowing through it, and it's really, it's raining down inside of there, you know, it's showering down. Very, very quiet filter. I'll knock it off, pull it apart, and I'll let you see exactly how it's gone together. The electrics are temporary. I'm going to redo all the electrics in the garden, so there's going to be a ring of armoured cable go all the way around the garden. With various points I can tap off electric from. But at the minute, it's just running off an extension that's attached to another point that I've got in my pond, or near the pond. Eventually, I'm going to take the feed from the cabin, which is up here, straight down, and have like a proper control box or sockets or something on one of these posts. Okay, this is the top one. Now, if you saw the previous video where I made this filter, you'll know it's got coarse foam, medium foam, fine foam, or pad, fine pad. And then it's got BioHome Ultra, so you're naturally assuming that these other two are filled with BioHome Ultra, seeing as I sell BioHome, and it's the best media available. Well, you'd be wrong. I actually want to raise the pH a little bit in that tank, and I want it quite mineralised, so I'm using pumice. This is the sort of pumice that's graded for use for filtering drinking water, so it's pretty much as good as you can get. Very porous, very light. There's only, I think, about five kilos in each one of these, but it takes up a big volume. Very good stuff. Just a quick recap of how these work. Water comes in, comes out the spray bar, goes through the various foams and fine pad, through the media, drops out the bottom, through those holes, onto here, through all these holes, down through this media, out the bottom, and then through this media as well, before coming out back into the tank. Right, so just imagine that we've done a bit of maintenance on that, and now we're going to set it back up. Bottom one goes in, middle one goes on top, and the top one goes on top of the middle one. So now we've got our three-tier shower system. I'll attach the pipe, connect the electric, and we're good to go. Almost silent. Now I do have a system in place to automatically top this up and do water changes, but unfortunately at the moment that's connected to my pond, which is mucky. hence the dirty water in here. So I haven't got that pump going but basically there's a little pump that sits in the pond which is about a 3000 litre an hour pump, pumps water up through a one inch pipe to the back of the tank, fills it up and then I've got two pipes here where the water flows down and then it goes back to the pond. There's the overflow pipes in there and really you can see the state of this, absolutely filthy. We'll see how long it takes to clear just using the And the three-tier shower system. There's looking from the side. If you notice a black blob there, that's actually a collection of pipes. I've got that for fish to hide in, and there's another one towards the back of the tank there. So I will not be adding any more water to this. I'm just going to see how long it takes to clear with the shower filter. There's the outlet pipes. Two outlet pipes going into a flexible two inch pipe which goes down under the ground and then it joins into a perforated field drain which is about four inches diameter before going back to the pond and on that field drain I've put a tee piece because I'm going to drain the land underneath the cabin which is always wet and boggy into there and away into the pond so hopefully it should dry all that lot up. There's the little pump that's used for the water changes and if And if the water ever clears in the pond... I'll just use the pond water to do the water changes. If it doesn't, I'm probably going to site this further away where the spring comes in. Make up some sort of container there for the spring water to go in before it gets to the pond. And I'll sit this in the spring water so it'll actually flush it through with spring water. That should work really well because the spring water is perfect quality. So at the minute, this one isn't doing anything. Now if you watched the last pond... I came on with perfect timing. I was going to say, if you watched the last pond update video, you'll know that the water wasn't circulating. I had electrical problems around here. I've restored the electric back to the pond, and I've put the big pump on a timer. I've done that because it costs a fortune to run. It'll end up costing about £1,200 a year because it's a real mega pump. 40,000 litres an hour. So it comes on for a quarter of an hour, then it goes off for half an hour, then on for a quarter of an hour, and it repeats. 24-7 perfect timing. Well almost two weeks have passed since I filmed that last bit of video and you can actually see inside the tank the water's cleared but it has taken two weeks using the shower filter which I've just switched off for filming purposes. I took it a long time and that fine pad has finally done its job. That's how difficult it is to settle out clay when it's soluble in water. You know you get the, wait check this out, that's the water that was pumped in. from the pond it's all stirred up and that's how clear it's gone but it has taken two weeks and really the glass could do with a bit of a clean as well but it'll be right see the pipes that i put in those pipes are for fish to hide in or for crayfish depending on what i put in here and basically just tie together with wire rocks on the top to keep them down i might put a few more bits and bobs in there but there's no point putting plants in because it's underneath all this structure i don't think it's going to get enough light but yeah that's basically it set up Now just ready for some fish. Well there you go that filter is a great success on that tank and I can't wait to get fish or some other sort of creatures in there. Just a reminder that if you want to see how to build that particular filter so you can build one for yourselves very very cheaply just check out the link in the video description. Thanks very much for watching if you've liked this video you'll probably like some of my other videos there's loads on the channel all split up into different playlists select the playlist that you fancy. Watch to your heart's content. Thanks for watching. See you next time.