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.

 

[goldfish freak]

LOL! Good one Slappy

 

[anonapersona]

Trickle towers are good

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 damn 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]

Links are gone

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]

Pond use

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.