People are spending a lot of money on bakki showers although there are so many easy ways to build one yourself. I am still surprised to see so many ponds without bakkie showers.

A bakki shower has got so many advantages of which the most important, the speed at which it matures, the major increase in oxygen and degassing of Nitrates(which the conventional biofilters don't do)

I have taken a photo of one of Colin Hunt's bakki showers last week. So easy. Just five containers, interlocking into each other, with a lot of holes at the bottom, and there you go. A DIY job in minutes.



Please post photo's of your bakki shower.

Hi Paul
Interesting and simple. A few questions:
1. Size of the trays?
2. Who manufactures them, and are they commercially available?
3. Media used?
4. Pump size?
5. From the photo, I cannot see the return to the pond. How is the water moved from the lowest tray back to the pond?

Somewhere I've seen a DIY Bakki with stackable Linbins.
Please give us some more info.
Regards
Jack

Hi Jack, these are commercial bins. Plastics for Africa. If you want them to fit into each other, you face them all in the same direction and if you want to stack them on top of each other like Colin did, you turn every second one around. Exact size unknown. Maybe Colin can help.

He has build a small compartment at the bottom where the first one fits in. The water purely goes down and over a lip into the pond. I would say he runs at least 10 000 per hour through the system?

Filled with Kaldness. He took out the Zeolite from the top bin due to ammonia spikes.

Re Lin bins, yes, I am using interlocking Lin bins quite effectively. Herewith a photo of a lin bin system on one of my porta pool ponds. Filled with hair curlers, bio balls and Alfagrog. It improved the water clarity and parameters on this pond dramatically.



The advantage here is that you can remove and add media easily. I often take out mature media for clients to boost their new systems, and easily replace them with new ones without needing to take of the bins to reach the media.

Thanks Paul. I may just attempt one myself for my QT pond. I'm sure the linbins -being partially open on the front ) allow for more aeration of the media, or not? My QT pond is one of the 2500 litre Minurphy portapools that are used as vats a koi shows. How would you mount a bakki to work on that setup i.e. above ground. Would you build a frame for the bottom bin to rest on?
i'm currently setting up my QT again, so advice would be greatly appreciated.
What pump is Colin using?
Come on Colin....why must Paul answer?
Regards
Jack

Jack Bach wrote:

How would you mount a bakki to work on that setup i.e. above ground. Would you build a frame for the bottom bin to rest on?

I have stacked a few building blocks on top of each other to reach the correct hight, and from the bottom tray(without holes), I channel the water back to the pond. I suppose a frame will look much better.






I have used pool aim flows for the inlet and outlet.



Colin's shower also have gaps for air intake which you can't see but I suppose the open front will provide more exposure to oxygen. However, you get a bit of water loss with the open front which causes the system to look dirty soon as you can see from the first photo.

Hi Jack,

I am running a .45 speck pump with three returns, one to the Bakkie shower the other two to the pond, mid return and one at the surface. I have ball valves on all three returns so that I can control the flow as I wish. At the moment I have 50% flowing through the bakkie shower.

I built a brick platform on the edge of the pond that supports the bakkie shower. The base of the platfrom is sloped towards the pond. So the water flows from the bottom tray onto the platform and into the pond. These bakkies sell for R250.00 each at Plastics For Africa. Very easy to remove, I can strip the entire tower in minutes.

Thanks Colin. Very neat - and clever - as they say in the ads, "truly ingenious".
Paul, what was the reason behind using pool aimflows for the inlet and outlet? The rubber seal it has when connecting to the bin? But how do you attach your spreader bar on the inside? The thread on the aimflow isn't compatible with standard PVC fittings.
Regards
Jack

Hi Jack, I found that an aimflow is much cheaper than any other connection for this purpose @ R 27.00. A 50mm PVC fits perfectly on the one side, and if you take out the little (eye) ball, a 40mm PVC pipe fits very well on the other side. See the second photo above.

Thanks Paul. That makes sense. It certainly is much cheaper than a tank connector. I never thought of the 40mm pipe fitting the inside of the aimflow.

More ideas:



























Neville




One of my own experiments


Bobby


Frans


Neville


And the nicest one of them all, the one of Angry Ant:

Great ideas, busy with mine and will post soon.

Wow Paul thanks for the comment on my Bakkie shower I am really pleased. Thanks for that

A Bakkie shower sounds like a great idea but in my setup it will be impossible to add it at my return. Will it still give good results if I add it before my 4 filter chambers???Not to much solids reach this point due to my settlement chamber and pre-filter

Hi Marius

As you know, the ideal is to have it as last filtration before the water enters the pond, but I can see no reason why you can not add it after your settlement chamber and before the gravity feed chambers. You will just have to clean the bakki's more often, as you will get more solids through the system as with the conventional position. If you do it this way, your system should be more of a trickle tower (where solid go through the system) than bakki (where solids might build up).

One advantage of doing it this way will be that the water through the filter chambers will have more oxygen, to the benefit of the Nitrobacter and Nitrosomonas building up in your chambers.

Another option in some cases would be to introduce a separate additional line for the bakki only, fed by the same pump with a T-piece and valve or additional pump.

Hi Marius,

Many years ago Dr Neville Marais had an up flow filter chamber which was working very well. He decided to test a trickle filter concept. All he did was T off his inlet from the pump at the side of teh filter chamber (this pushed the water to the bottom of the filter chamber) and run a second pipe up to the top of the filter chamber - actually about 800mm above the top of the chamber.

He built a scaffold of piping to hold coke crates about 20cm above the level of the water. Into this scaffold he placed a row of coke crates and piped the new water nlet into a spray bar which ran across the top of the crates.

The crates were filled with palstic - I cannot recall which plastic - but they were stuffed full of plastic. The water was sprayed over the cartes and cascaded down onto of the water coming up through the stone bed.

The water rising and the water cascading downwards mixed and returned to the pond through the existing returns. These were several 110 mm pipes.

Very easy and very cheap for masses of extra oxygen and extra filtration.

Regards,
Chris

Hi Marius,

I am sure you have seen my bakki shower on this thread. I have a similar one on my main pond which is situated after my settlement chamber and bio filter. A 0.25 kw pump picks up the water from the last chamber of the bio filter and pumps it through the bakki shower and cascades into a chamber where it is pumped via 0.75 kw to two sand filters, two bio filters, UV's and back to the pond. It has great results and works well. This was the only way I could make use of a Bakki shower as my pond is at the front door to the house and did not want an unsightly filter there.

I like all the photos it realy helps to get the creative juices going.
What and in what order would you put in the bakki shower as filter media
Also where can I get oyster shells?
If I have hard water (from borehole) would I need oyster shells?

According to me the order of media in a bakki shower does not make a real difference.

I like kaldness but there are so many media on the market, Alfagrog, Bio Balls, Hair curlers, Plastic shavings, etc etc. All with different surface area for media to grow. All depends on your budget and availability.

If you have a low pH, the Oyster shells will assist, if your pH is high, it will do nothing, except create a bit of surface area for bacteria, although the surface area is not good compared to other media.

The most symple bakki shower. Took me a 15 minutes to get it operational. R 56 per bin from Plastic for Africa, a few bucks for the bio media, and a lot more additional filtration.

Admin I know We are supposed to be serious here, but I guess We can make an exception for my bakki...
I made it out of old beer crates (free), rather extra large in size, media???? dont ask! Put inside what I could find here...broken bricks one line, gravel another...and izeki ... since I am the izeki lady.
I managed to swizz a foam collector at the end of it..

Very practical and cheap. I also considered using beer crates. If I take my crates back to the bottle stoor, I only get R 30.00 each. Much less than what I pay for at places selling crates. Problem, I don't drink that much beer.

I dont drink at all! I have a tenant...rents a night club from me. He gave them to me for free.
I get lots of freebies from my tenants...Imagine one sells cell phones....

Admin wrote:

Very practical and cheap. I also considered using beer crates. If I take my crates back to the bottle stoor, I only get R 30.00 each. Much less than what I pay for at places selling crates. Problem, I don't drink that much beer.

This is my Bakki shower

Hey fischerchem

Looks good!

Question, where did you get that tray from and what media is that in there?