The original bubble bead filter was gravity cleaned and if left uncleaned
would glue the beads together in the top, making it very difficult to get a
good cleaning, and this may have led to the problems that Jo Ann found.
There is a simple method of plumbing the bubble bead filters that makes it a
pressurized water cleaned system, and I have been using this system on my
bubble bead filter for four years and feel that I am getting good service
from it. The newer style filters are all designed using the swimming pool
sand filter tank. They have pressurized backwash, sludge valves in the
bottom, and a rinse cycle that expels anything that was light and loosened
during the cleaning cycle and sends it to waste. The H2S would either be
expelled through the bottom during backwash or through the top during rinse.
Most of the new filters have a blower attached that uses air to bubble the
water to thoroughly clean the beads using much less water. I am getting
ready to get one of these newer filters for my large pond and move the old
bubble bead to the smaller pond.

Everyone overstocks their ponds. They don't set out to. The fish grow.
They use rules like one fish per hundred gallons. I have one fish per 200
gallons in my large pond. Most of these fish are between 6 and 10 pounds.
That makes my filter have to filter the waste of about 150 pounds of fish.
My small pond is on a gravel bed veggie filter. It has about 3000 pounds of
gravel that has to be cleaned about twice a year. I am not as young as I
once was.
--
RichToyBox
http://www.geocities.com/richtoybox/pondintro.html


wrote in message
...
I identified Jo Ann as the person who said this several times. She was
reporting
that more than just a couple people were bringing her their defunct bead
filters and
dying or dead fish. that is part of what she does for a living, she is a
fish
diagnostician.