Yeah it's been quite awhile since I've been around. I've been crazy busy with various projects. A lot of work on rebuilding a motorcycle, then I built a greenhouse over my garden last Fall. Trying to get more work done on the motorcycle, but then I had a kid hit my truck in March, and I'm finally getting the alignment issues fixed and we hit a deer out on the highway last weekend. So this week I've been replacing both front fenders, the hood, a headlight, the entire grill... whew!
In the meantime, the back board on my waterfall has been sagging so badly that it's been leaking water over the back edge through most of the Winter, and getting so bad I've had to top off the water every day this week. I decided to get a head start on repairs by cleaning out the gravel in the basin today. Quite a chore when both of my elbows have been hurting for the last few months, but I made good progress, was able to get down the the bottom before I had to call it quits. There's probably less than 2 gallons of remaining gravel, so finishing it up won't take much longer. The gravel was horribly saturated with fish waste, but I was able to scoop out most of the water by hand.
Once the basin was mostly empty, I discovered that the back board had sagged much lower than I realized over the last few years. Some scrap boards were enlisted to prop it back up to the original height, and the temporary fix was enough to hold weight once I started the pumps back up, and now the rubber liner is about 3" above the water line again. This gives me some time to think about what to do about the waste problem before I finished rebuilding the wall.
The plan for the back wall itself is fairly straightforward. Instead of a single piece of 1/2" wafer board (what was I thinking???) I'm going to cut up a bunch of 2x6 redwood boards to make the retaining wall, and this time I'll make them the same height as the filter barrels. The other problem was I cut off the rubber liner too short. I'll solve this with 2-3 strips of seam tape and a lot of overlap between the old and new pieces of liner material so I can bring the liner up over the top and back side of the new rear wall.
The part that needs some thought is my idea for using the basin at the top of the waterfall as a gravel filter. I have a filter barrel on either side of the waterfall, so I rigged up one of the outputs from each barrel to pipes with slits cut down their length. The pipes sit at about a 30-degree angle, and the bubbles coming up from them tell me that water is in fact being pushed down through them. However the real concern is whether there will still be water flow after gravel is poured over the top of them. Ideally I should have a strong flow of water that pushed up from the bottom of the gravel, and I don't think I'm going to get that with the current setup. I do have another idea though... Since each pump pushes 3000gph, more than is needed for a barrel filter, I'm think of tapping the excess flow to push straight into the under-gravel pipes, rather than relying on a gravity feed. I'll just have to pick up some more pipes this week to re-plump the output and test the idea, but I think this has the best of succeeding.
So anyway... yeah I've been busy. Miss me?
In the meantime, the back board on my waterfall has been sagging so badly that it's been leaking water over the back edge through most of the Winter, and getting so bad I've had to top off the water every day this week. I decided to get a head start on repairs by cleaning out the gravel in the basin today. Quite a chore when both of my elbows have been hurting for the last few months, but I made good progress, was able to get down the the bottom before I had to call it quits. There's probably less than 2 gallons of remaining gravel, so finishing it up won't take much longer. The gravel was horribly saturated with fish waste, but I was able to scoop out most of the water by hand.
Once the basin was mostly empty, I discovered that the back board had sagged much lower than I realized over the last few years. Some scrap boards were enlisted to prop it back up to the original height, and the temporary fix was enough to hold weight once I started the pumps back up, and now the rubber liner is about 3" above the water line again. This gives me some time to think about what to do about the waste problem before I finished rebuilding the wall.
The plan for the back wall itself is fairly straightforward. Instead of a single piece of 1/2" wafer board (what was I thinking???) I'm going to cut up a bunch of 2x6 redwood boards to make the retaining wall, and this time I'll make them the same height as the filter barrels. The other problem was I cut off the rubber liner too short. I'll solve this with 2-3 strips of seam tape and a lot of overlap between the old and new pieces of liner material so I can bring the liner up over the top and back side of the new rear wall.
The part that needs some thought is my idea for using the basin at the top of the waterfall as a gravel filter. I have a filter barrel on either side of the waterfall, so I rigged up one of the outputs from each barrel to pipes with slits cut down their length. The pipes sit at about a 30-degree angle, and the bubbles coming up from them tell me that water is in fact being pushed down through them. However the real concern is whether there will still be water flow after gravel is poured over the top of them. Ideally I should have a strong flow of water that pushed up from the bottom of the gravel, and I don't think I'm going to get that with the current setup. I do have another idea though... Since each pump pushes 3000gph, more than is needed for a barrel filter, I'm think of tapping the excess flow to push straight into the under-gravel pipes, rather than relying on a gravity feed. I'll just have to pick up some more pipes this week to re-plump the output and test the idea, but I think this has the best of succeeding.
So anyway... yeah I've been busy. Miss me?
