Trickle Tower for nitrate removal.

[avoxo]

I was on another board and they were talking about DIY trickle tower to remove nitrates.

Does anyone know how to build one or currently use one now? How well do they work?

Avoxo

[RTR]

I'm confused - trickle towers, aka wet/dry filters, are used for more efficient biofifitration. Biofiltration is oxidation by bacteria of fish waste in the form of ammonia to nitrite and then to nitrate by other bacteria. So W/Ds are nitrate producers, not removers.

[Slappy*McFish]

DIY water changes are remarkable reducers of nitrates.:rolleyes:

[goldfish freak]

LOL! Good one Slappy :D

[anonapersona]

I've read quite a lot on this and have the plans drawn up for my own, but I've decided to focus on the indoor tanks instead -- and avoid those **** mosquitoes.

Anyhow, yes, among pond people, the trickle towers are great. The cheapest, with lava rocks and a strawberry pot combine a veggie filter with bio filteration. The taller variety, with bioballs or bath or kitchen scrubbies inside PVC are easier to hide. Both do very well at maintaining water quality. I think that there were some details about size, if I recall, 18 or 20 inches tall minimum (from malaysian koi groups) and the bioballs should be 1/10th or 1/12th the diameter of the pipe (from local water treatment industry supply technician). Anyhow, I found bath scrubbies at the dollar store and only lacked a pump that could deliver that much head. Now I have all that and have lost interest.

You need a lot of air circulation and they can be noisy with high flow rates, flow rate should be equal to one pond size per hour.

If you want, I might be able to direct you to some of the koi pond forums that have done the reasearch on this. The general concensus is that they do a fine job on eliminating green water and nitrates....I will double check that, however and return to edit this if that was nitrites, not nitrates.

[Fishiebusiness]

Nitrates require anaerobic conditions to be biologically converted to nitrogen gas.

[anonapersona]

Both Cyberfins.com and Roark's Experimental Puddle seem to be gone. I didn't look around the malaysian koi forum too long. Cyberfins was there just yesterday, maybe it is the internet, some things are slow today. If it comes back, it is hard to get to the archived discussions, you have to poke around a bit.

So, I just don't think I can help. I can only guess that either it is algae growing on the lava rocks in the strawberry pot version, or in the planted pond we are actually nitrate limited and so the plants suck up the nitrates, or in the sterile koi pond with no plants, no dirt, just big well fed fish, they don't care about nitrates, only nitrites and ammonia.

Perhaps there is anaerobic bacteria deep inside the lava rocks working to denitrate the water.

I seem to recall a claim by the cell pore folks that sintered glass could actually remove ntrates. That would have been from a supply catalog, Drs Foster Smith or Big Al's I guess.

anona, reads a lot, knows a little

[Aquaman2000]

I think what you are talking about is a "coil de-nitrator."

It is a tower filled with bio-balls and a very long coil of airline tubing. Water from the tank is slowly dripped into the tubing. This water is oxygenated and aerobic bacteria begin to populate the inside of the tube. After several feet of the tube, the water has had the oxygen depeleted by the aerobic bactreria. At this point, the anaerobic bacteria begin to populate the rest of the tube, and the bio-balls. Now the anaerobic bacteria convert the nitrates into nitrogen gas, which bubbles out of the return line to the tank. From what I have read, they do work as advertised, removing nitrates. However, they are prone to "crashing" and taking out the entire tank with it.

Also, nitrate levels are really a just guide to the buildup of other toxins, and decaying matter that can only be removed by frequent water changes. So the way I see it, this setup does not buy you anything.

You could try one, and see if it works. Personally I wouldn't want to risk my fish being lost if the thing crashes.

Hope this helps.

[beviking]

Never heard of that b4. Some wells are prone to nitrogen super-saturation that reaks havoc in fish. A simple tower set up with media in it allows the nitrogen gas to escape. This isn't being confused with nitrate removal is it?????

[anonapersona]

In the pond, the trickle tower is set up with a pump that circulates water from the pond to a spray head or drip plate then over a depth of lava rocks or bioballs. Unless the water is straight out of the filter, it would require some mechanical filtration to keep the media from plugging up. Often this is simply a filter pad on top of the set up. Flow rate is one turnover per hour. This is frequently recommended for cloudy or green ponds. Some of these designs have had a submerged section which I never understood the need for. One of those sites that I can no longer locate had a lot of info about this, including testing.

When I began learning about aquariums, I was surprised that there were no trickle towers for tanks, but I did find a sintered glass filter cartridge. Nitrates in my planted tank were always very low, but I never knew if it was the cell-pore cartridge, my Penguin biowheel filter, or the plants. I removed the cell-pore and the bio-wheel when I began adding nitrate to the tank for the plants.

How this could get rid of nitrates while wet dry filters do not, I don't know, but I suspect the lava is key. Perhaps if a wet/dry filter was loaded with the sintered glass or lava rock media from canister filters instead of bioballs you might get a different result than the "nitrate factory" as reported. I see that Kent Marine has a Bio-Rocker wet/dry using Cell-Pore sintered glass that has"bio-slab and denitrifying block to bring nitrate levels to zero."

Again, I can't explain these things, I can only guess.

[RTR]

Wet/dry filters and "trickle towers" are biologically the same thing.

Lava is an alternate medium, but it needs to have a fine filter after it to capture the fine and rough particulates it sheds, otherwise you can destroy your pumps.

[Elmo]

Originally posted by anonapersona

How this could get rid of nitrates while wet dry filters do not, I don't know, but I suspect the lava is key.

The nitrifying bacteria that convert Ammonia -> NitrIte and NitrIte -> NitrAte live in aerobic conditions such as those found in Wet/Dry filters.

While the denitrifying bacteria that convert NitrAtes -> NitrItes -> Nitrogen gas live in anearobic conditions. The "trickle towers" create the anearobic conditions necessary for these bacteria do grow.

[anonapersona]

Yes, I recognized the similarities, but why can a bio-rocker claim to reduce nitrates to zero when a wet/dry does not? Maybe a trickle tower is more like a bio-rocker?

One thing that is different between the trickle tower and the wet/dry is the depth of media, the koi club sites were pretty specific about needing more depth than I observe in the wet/dry filters in catalogs, and this was based on testing, as I recall. My notes say that minimum was 18 inches, I recall that some ponds used more. The minimum for the strawberry pot version was about 18 inches but the big ponds (over 1000 gallons, maybe 5,000) used 55 gallon drums (suspended over an indoor pond) or 5 foot tall PVC standing pipes (with 1200 gallons).

The trickle towers were also low flow. How does that compare to wet/dry filters? Maybe if the water exits too rapidly the nitrates just haven't had a chance to be processed. There was some data on transit times, but I don't have that. Maybe a bio-rocker works (I'm assuming that it does, of course, as advertised!) because it slows the transit time to make up for the short height.

Cell-pore makes cubes but I'll bet they would tend to crumble a bit. I saw some "professional substrat" or something like that by Eheim that is round balls of sintered glass. I suspect that this would be safer than lava, and the cubes, for situations where the pump was after (as in below the tank pumping up) rather than before (as we do in ponds where we are pumping to the top of a tower then flowing down).

Anyhow I find myself curious whether a deeper bed (18") of sintered glass balls in a wet/dry would take the nitrate out of an aquarium.

Not that I would do it, I know that my plants need those water changes.

anona, curiouser and curiouser

[RTR]

ALL W/Ds are strongly aerobic so long as they are emerse. They are, by design, the opposite of anaerobic. If they have submerse portions it would depend on the flow and medium size and nauture.

Lava rock supposedly has internal pores where anaerobic bacteria can grow. Eheim's Ehfisustrat definitely does. But neither of the these media are internally self-cleaning - they must be periodically replaced if you want the denitrification functionality as the micropores where this occurs block themselves off with bacterial growth. Eheim also specifies that fine filter pads are to be used after Ehfisubstrat to protect the pump.

The Cell-Pore material is another sintered or comparable glass product - it should have similar micropores to Ehfisubstrat.

[avoxo]

I did not mean to "open a can of worms" :D but I decided to do a search of and found this http://www.livingjewels.com/DIY/tt/tt.htm

I think this will help shed some light. I guess no one uses one here. :rolleyes:

Avoxo

[anonapersona]

I saw, somehwere, the new "Eheim Efisubstrat Pro", or something like that, about twice the cost, for perfectly round marbles of sintered glass, promoted as being self cleaning. I don't see it in the print catalog of Dr Fosters Smith or Big Al's, I must have seen it online.http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?siteid=6&pCatId=8983

Hmm, I don't see the self-cleaning part, now where did I come up with that? Maybe I imagined that.

[beviking]

Round sintered balls may be self cleaning externally, but the pores and internal structure wouldn't be.
As for trickle towers and transit times for water to pass through, maybe the aerobic bacteria use up the oxygen in the upper or first part of the filter(tower), allowing anaerobic bacteria to grow in the lower (latter) part of the filter???
Ponds were mentioned. By nature, they are warmer temperature and therefor have a lower capacity for dissoved oxygen.

[RTR]

Trickle towers are just another name for wet/dry filters(as has been said before), and as such are excellect nitrification devices.

Denitrification sintered glass media is far too expensive to use a disposable item in pond filters - whether emerse or submerse.

Emerse plant filters are far more practical for denitrification for pond use.. For tanks, nothing else approaches the low cost of water changes - and they remove all pollutants, not just nitrate.

[Dr. Fishenstein]

To remove Nitrates wouldnt an automatic water changer do the trick?

[Slappy*McFish]

I automatically change my water once a week.

[avoxo]

I also change about 20% of the water in my tanks every 5 days to help control the nitrates in my tanks. But found it interesting that you could build a filter that would remove nitrates naturally WITHOUT any use of chemicals or plants.

After reading some posts on pond message boards, some people have large ponds or indoor ponds to keep the fish from the winter elements. If you had to do a water change on a 10,000 gallon pond or a 300-500 gallon indoor pond that would be insane amount of water to try to change weekly but building a trickle tower to help control nitrates naturally is a great idea

Avoxo