| Bakki Showers: Where's The Dirt?
There has been a lot of activity on the boards lately about Bakki Showers, with the big question being, as always, where does the waste go?
My BS has been operating since the first week of May. In that period of nearly 3 months, all I've done is remove the few tree leaves that somehow get blown under the cover into the top media tray. I also remove leaves (& frogs) that get caught in the leaf basket of the pump leading to it. The water first goes through a skimmer with a fairly open mat. A separate skimmer feeds a bead filter. The bead filter collects plenty of glarf over the course of a week. What about the Bakki? Both get approximately 5,000 gallons of water per hour.
The water fed to the Bakki returns through two underground 4" pipes. As shown in the thread on the pond's construction, the returns are plumbed into the base of the bottom tray and stand a little over an inch above the base of the tray. The bottom try is filled with Bacteria House media. Given the amount of glarf captured in the bead filter, it seems logical to me that there would be a layer of sediment in the bottom tray of the Bakki.
Today I checked out the bottom tray. There was sediment... a fine dusting of sediment. There was no thick layer of sediment. It seems to me there should have been more.
The 3 pictures show the undisturbed media in the top tray, the bottom tray with some media removed (after turning off the pump and letting the water stop draining from above), and a closer shot of the same (sorry for the blur). |