Building a Vortex

First you'll need to find a plastic barrel you'll have to find a place to get this. A factory may have these that soap came in. In either case they will have to be washed out real well. You will need some 3 or 4 inch plastic pipe, some elbows and some silicon that is for aquariums. A vortex works best with a bottom drain in your pond. So you will need to have the top of the vortex at or slightly above the water level of the pond if it is to be gravity feed so that might mean digging another hole! You don't want your pump before the vortex as the pump will grind up any debris that your vortex would normally catch. Attach one end of the plastic pipe to your bottom drain and the other end to the side of the plastic barrel about half way up (use the silicone here). Near the top you'll need to cut another hole in the barrel and attach another pipe using silicone ,to feed your filter. In the bottom attach another pipe with a shut off valve. ( I didn’t do this so I have to use a bucket to drain my vortex) If you use ABS plastic piping you be able to find all the connections and fittings you'll need! they also make threaded connections which are handy for attaching the pipe to the barrel but you'll still need the silicon to make a good seal!

OUR BIO FILTER

Building A Bio Filter:

Take a trip to your local pond supply store and check out the different filters. Make a note of what they use as medium and the way the water is to travel (input& output) threw the different filters. This is what we did and came up with the filter above.Once we got on the internet we were suprised to find detailed pictures on how to make filters similar to ours.

You will need a large rubbermaid container,silicone (safe for aquariums), sand paper (helps silicone stick to the container), threaded 3 or 4 inch conectors for your water supply, brushes( we used toilet bowl brushes found at a dollar store),somthing to divide the container but allow the water threw(plastic sheets or egg crate light panels),air tubeing and air stones, an airpump (this gets the bio working faster and puts oxigen into the water),filter medium (this we bought in sheets from our pond supplier and cut to fit),as an added extra we found some bio balls onsale at an aquarium store and added them,you will need a pump to push the water back into the pond. The whole system is below water level so it is gravity feed.

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