Trickle Tower for nitrate removal.

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.
 
Re: Pond use

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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
differences that I see

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
 
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.
 
New eheim sintered glass balls

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
I automatically change my water once a week.
 
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