The other day I cleaned my pre-filter. When I do this I also lower the
water about half way in the bio-chambers that contain open cell foam. My
foam is now on its 13th year. (Gosh, how time flies!) It now is starting to
fall forward when I lower the water level and the one side would not behave
even when I brought the water level up and turned on the pump. It wanted to
continue to slump. I ended up putting this coarse matala pad I got to try
in behind it to support it.

So now I'm thinking, I need to bite the bullet and buy the fine matala to
replace the open cell, or at least most of the open cell foam. Maybe keep a
pad or two for the middle.

Just wondering if anyone has an opinion regarding this. I was wondering if
I have to have the same 8" filled with media (horizontal flow, current
media is approx. 22" X 30" and then eight 1" pads deep)? Anyone know of a
website that is selling it in rolls at a good price? ~ jan

I have been thinking about this also. I had planned to make a "skippy
filter" using a 150 gallon Rubbermaid stock tank. I'm just not sure about
how to configure the pads. Should I lay them flat or stand them up?
San Diego Joe

Hi SD Joe, Is there a pre-filter before the Rubbermaid? If not, standing
them up will let you get to the front and dirtier pad easier to clean it...
unless you have down flow where laying them flat the dirty one would be on
top. Down flow is supposedly the least efficient. We went with horizontal
flow, pads standing up, because we thought the first one would get dirty,
but with the pre-filter, that never happened. Now I clean all the pads
once/year. One chamber is done in the fall, and the other chamber (that ran
all winter) is done mid-summer. ~ jan

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Zone 7a, SE Washington State
Ponds: www.jjspond.us