I know another pump question
Frank, Just got a chance to skim through your email and caught one BIG problem with the plans for your biofilter. DO NOT use lava rocks, sand, or pea gravel as media in your biofilter unless you’re prepared to handle a LOT of hard work and problems after a few months. Some time it takes several months, and sometimes it takes only a couple months, but using rocks as a biofilter media will always lead to hard, messy work when the need to clean the biofilter arises. Lava rocks work great as a biofilter media for awhile (in fact, it’s an outstanding media to start with (because of its very high surface area), but when it becomes dirty and starts clogging up with mulm, all of the small pores in the rock start to plug up. That reduces the surface area significantly so the media becomes much less efficient. When it comes to cleaning lava rocks, it can be very hard and messy work to remove the rock, clean it, then replace, (and the rock can’t be cleaned good enough without having to remove it from the filter chambers). About the only way to really clean it is with a high pressure stream of water, or by pressure washing it. It’s almost impossible to clean the rock good enough to recover the high surface area the rock once had. About the only way to get the very high surface area lava rock provides is to just replace the rock with new rock, … but them you lose your nitrifying bacteria colonies (basically killing the biofilter). I know lava rock is a very cheap source for biofilter media, but for me and many others, the amount of work and mess it creates once it gets dirty, just isn’t worth the low price.
I think you would be much better off paying more money to get far superior media that in the long run is much less messy and work intensive. The biofilter media I use is PolyFlo batting. The PolyFlo I use is a 2 inch thick, course (porous), stiff, batting that comes in rolls that are about 56 inches wide, and it’s usually sold by the lineal foot. The 2 inch batting is about $10-12.00 per lineal foot. PolyFlo has 1/2 inch and 1 inch batting that provide finer filtration (great for mechanical filtration), but the 2 inch is ideal for the biological applications. PolyFlo is by no means the only biological media available. Some of the other koi keepers use different types of media to accomplish the same biological filtration. Some use materials such as Matala (similar material to PolyFlo, but much more durable) small scrubby pads, bio-balls, blue corrugated plastic electrical pipes cut into 1/4 - 1/2 inch lengths, etc, etc. All of them can be very good for use as a biofilter media. One thing you’ll learn with your pond/koi keeping hobby is that there is NO absolutely correct way to do things. The same outcome can be accomplished through the use of a large variety of different approaches. The one most important constant with koi keeping is the NEED for a GREAT water environment. Creating a great water environment can be accomplished in a variety of different ways, but as long as the outcome is a great water environment, it doesn’t matter how you created it. 
A bit later, I’ll go over the numbers you included in your email and see how they work out for me. Do you have any pictures or drawings of you pond project and the filter/plumbing plans I could take a look at? Might give me a better idea of the layout of your project. How many gallons of water will your pond alone have in it? Don ikeepkoi
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Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society
