Thanks Tim, I appreciate that and almost certainly will.
Rich Sacher has been encouraging me to enter my plants for the last couple of years and I've almost gotten around to it a couple of times. It's just never the most important thing for me to do since I've always got an unfolding disaster looming over me that I'm always trying to keep ahead of.
Right now my looming disaster that has been unfolding is that I have been losing lots of seedlings to melt because of my inability to provide continuous flow through of extremely low nutrient bio filtered water.
I know what to do I just need to get it done. Meanwhile my seedlings are dying, but don't worry, I have tens of thousands of seeds left over from last year and from this year that are sprouting faster than I can get them planted, another looming disaster.
Breeding season is basically over for the year here, now I turn into a plumber for a while.
Any suggestions on the best homemade bio filter would be greatly appreciated.
Right now I'm about to start construction on a plastic 55 gallon rock and sand layered, air cleaned bio filter that I found described on the filtration forum in the " How to layer a bio filter " by Greg, thread, that looks good to me. I have the drums and can easily do the plumbing, I just wonder since my solar power system provides very little power during very cloudy stretches in winter, how much flow through will I have to have in order to keep my filter Bactria alive and happy. What is the minimum exchange rate of water that is contained in the filter. not the exchange rate for the pools themselves. Also I need to know how long the filter bacteria can go without any flow before they die and become a nutrient source instead of a nutrient absorber.
Another question is how good of a bio filter is this filter. I need LOW nutrient water, not crystal clear water necessarily.
I will be filtering about 4-5 thousand gallons but there will be a very low nutrient load, no fertilizer and no fish food for instance, just lily seedlings in low nutrient soil.
Any help in this department would be a big help to me and my lilies. Thanks.
