[androal]

The spirex vortex is 48" deep with a 4" tangental intake at the bottom of the vortex - right where the cone starts... the base of the vortex is cone shaped (design is intended to 'funnel' the detritus into the drainage pipe located at the bottom center)

There is a nice diagram of this filter on page 16 of the laguna koi catalog at:

http://www.lagunakoi.com/html/LKPver11.pdf

So… if I understand the design you are describing, I would simply connect the 4" out-take port at the very top of the vortex to a single horizontal pipe (with a cap on the end of it, and slits cut across the length of it).

Since the vortex is approx. 40” in diameter, I can probably use around a 38” pipe to span the diameter of the vortex chamber. What you are saying is, the depth of the basket should not exceed the distance from the side of the basket to the slits in this 4" pipe. Since the pipe is located at center of vortex, the distance from the side of the basket to the pipe slits equals the radius of the basket (approximately 19"). So the depth of the basket should not exceed about 17" (given the pipe's diameter of 4").


As an aside, this design DOES provide ample space between the tangential intake located approx. 40” down near the bottom of the vortex base. So the only design concern would be if the resulting dimensions of the basket end up being too shallow to accomodate sizeable enough K media.

RESULTING DIMENSIONS: 38” diameter basket (with the 4" pipe entering the very top of the basket and spanning the entire diameter of the vortex) The basket would be approx. 17" deep (constructed so the distance from the bottom of the basket to the pipe slits is no more than the radius of the basket, per above...) resulting in... just under 12 cubic feet of volume for the K1 to fill... and the question becomes... is this adequate volume?

Correct?