airlift in swimming pond

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werner
Posts: 6
Joined: 04 May 2019, 10:06

airlift in swimming pond

Post by werner »

Once the sun is more present at the end of spring, my kids insist that I buildup an inflatable pool so that they can play around the whole summer, which is a start of a race against algae, requiring large doses of chlorine, coagulant, and permanent pump action to keep he water a bit clear, to finish the swim season with draining 10m3 meter of water and a huge cleaning job of the plastic swimming pool.
So I planned to dig a hole in the grond and to establish a natural swimming pond, not for Koi but for kids. I read a lot of articles about filtration and water circulation and my worry was the energy consumption to turn around the water through the filtering plant beds.
Until I stumbled on this forum which gave me a bit of eureka feeling. :idea:
My plan is to have a deeper swimming zone of 3X9m and 1,5m deep resulting in nearly 40m3 plus an undeep plantbed filtration zone of 24m3.
Now I will have no fish so the recirculation requirements are less severe as with a koi pond I read. If I turn around the water once every 4-5 hours this should be enough to maintain equilibrium... so a 15m3/hr waterflow would be sufficient. Unless anybody with more experience tells me it is not so :?:
The pond would be all communicating vessels, with no height difference (no waterfall) and just a 300micron screen sieve before the airlift coming from the water suction collector and a skimmer. Although there are no trees around I want to avoid organic debris to collect in the pond and remove it as soon as possible. So water will be collected from the bottom of the swimming zone + the skimmer, pumped drought the sieve and a 2m long airlift per this forum's design to a diffuser in the filter bed with plants, whereby the water will flow through the gravel bottom-up to the surface, which is in direct communication with the swimming part, and where it will be flowing direction pump again through the swim zone.
I attached the principle in a drawing.
I got the idea to suck the water at the bottom of the pond through a collector made of many drilled PVC pipes from an American pond enthusiast who built this set-up in the gravel at the bottom of his pond, and who emptied his pond after 22years (!) with the intention to clean the sludge out of his old gravel, to find out at his surprise that it was perfectly clean !
The same principle applies to the filterbed: if you have the water migrate from the top through the bottom, organic debris will collect at the bottom requiring -every so many years- to clean the whole gravel. And I do not want to do this! So reverse filtration (bottom-up) has a "self-cleaning" action on the bottom of the gravel which should reduce the sludge build-up.
As there is a height difference in bottom between the swim area and filter area my question is how this might affect the working principle of the airlift?
I thought the efficiency might be impaired but looking at the full plexiglass airlift demo pump, it also works with a height difference in return pipe...
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated before I start digging !
werner
Posts: 6
Joined: 04 May 2019, 10:06

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by werner »

Cannot load drawings/pictures... how do I add them?
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Pssymon
Posts: 204
Joined: 11 Dec 2015, 00:12
Location: The Netherlands

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by Pssymon »

Hello Werner and welcome,

Looks like I missed your post, apologies.
Your plan looks good. I agree with most of your points.
Seeing the sketch would help a great deal.

I host my images on Flickr, then share the BBCode link here (without image tags) and it will work:

Image6 Drawing Pond Bartol Complete overhead view V2 by Airlift EU, on Flickr

It should also be possible to host images on the site directly, I've done it before. I will look into it.
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Pssymon
Posts: 204
Joined: 11 Dec 2015, 00:12
Location: The Netherlands

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by Pssymon »

Figured it out, you can use the gallery function, next to your username in the top right of the site. Here you can create an album, upload images and simply share them with the BBCode for example.

When I paste this: '[image]54996-[/image]', it embeds:

54996
werner
Posts: 6
Joined: 04 May 2019, 10:06

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by werner »

Great, created album with name "Werner". But cannot upload images. Upload settings are currently set to certain image size but also "Maximum allowed bytes : 0 bytes" Even a picture of 40Kb does not upload. Need permission to upload images by someone.
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Pssymon
Posts: 204
Joined: 11 Dec 2015, 00:12
Location: The Netherlands

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by Pssymon »

I tried increasing the file size limit, but it does not seem to work. I've asked the webmaster, hopefully he can fix this. I will reply as soon as this issue has been resolved. Apologies for the inconvenience, very odd indeed.
janus
Posts: 45
Joined: 26 Nov 2016, 14:32
Location: Benissa

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by janus »

Can you try it again Werner?
werner
Posts: 6
Joined: 04 May 2019, 10:06

Re: airlift in swimming pond

Post by werner »

Here are the drawings of the pond I intend to build...
Maybe they do not appear here although this was my intention... then check under Galery/user images/Werner

app.php/gallery/image/55009/medium
app.php/gallery/image/55008/medium
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