Iron removal apparatus I set up as an experiment.

[Cecil]

One of the annoying things many of us deal with in fish culture with the use of ground water is iron in the well water that precipitates out when oxygen is added to the water. From what I've read, it's a worldwide issue with some having more iron in their water than others. A few lucky few have none. It not only creates unsightly staining and clogging of equipment, and attracts iron bacteria, which can be another problem. It also can be stressful on fish, especially smaller fish with finer gill filaments. Microscopically it has sharp edges and can irritate a fishes gills. This can lead to gill infections and the loss of fish.

For a short while I rented an iron filtraton system from a local water filtration company. It's wasn't excessively expensive but it didn't take long for the resin to wear out on me, and therefore I couldn't justify the cost.

I noticed with my drum clarifier on my fish tank, which consists of a 'u-tube" siphon that pulls water out of the fish tank to the bottom of the 55 gallon drum clarifier tank ,where it has to make it's way up through a lot of filtration netting before being pumped out back to the biofilter, that the it was pretty effective at removing the iron in my make up water.

To that end, I decided to set to drums side by side and duplicate the process, but this time to simply remove iron. It's working, although not as fast as I thought it would. But faster than just allowing the iron to settle. I will probably tweek it a little as in experimenting with different filtration media. It's also very possible as the netting i am using collects iron it will become more effective, as from what I've read iron starts to stick to itself once it collects on something. There is a term for this but I forget what it is.

Anyway here's pic of the process.

[Cecil]

I forgot to add it's important to add oxygen to the well water to get the iron to precipitate, which I do by filling the barrels using the same garden hose and spray nozzle that is used on the drip system.

[Cecil]

Update:

The second time around with new iron laden water, which initially colors the water brown at about 2.41 mg/l the water became clear in about 24 hours. As I suspected the presence of iron on the filter material actually attracts the iron particles making the filter work faster. And of course the filter material is probably a little more clogged but considering how little iron their is in a that much water it can't be as much a factor as the iron attracting the iron.

[Cecil]

Another update:

I have had zero morts since I started filtering most of the iron out of my make up water. I knew something was stressing them and apparently it was the iron.They are also feeding better and mroe aggressively. I'm also using a drip system of adding fresh water, but I honestly don't think that's a big factor in the drop of morts as ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates have always been well below sub-optimum rates. Ammonia and nitrites are not high enough to be readable.

Iron drops from about 2.46 mg/l to 0.2 mg/l in about 24 hours using my filtration system. I would assume since the make up water makes up 1/6th of the system's volume, it may drop even further when the make up water is dispursed through the system. I'm thinking 1/6th of that, which would be about 0.033 mg/l. Water is gin clear at only 0.2 mg/l and the fish tank water has stayed gin clear also.

I'll test iron levels in the entire system soon.

[Cecil]

Here's a diagram that may help:



The red arrows are the water direction.

[qommunity]

Hi, Cecil!

Just a thought (not really sure if this is possible/feasible), would magnets help?

[ande]

No
cheers

[Cecil]

No
cheers

Ditto.

For some reason the iron that is precipitated out is not attracted to a magnet. Ive tried it!

[Cecil]

You know what's interesting? Once I enlarged the volume of the system to about 500 gallons by adding a tank to hold the RBC, adding iron laden ground water of about 10 percent of the volume for make up water is no longer a problem. Hardly even colors the water.

[Pugo]

I not sure how lucky I am not having iron in my water as, plants would be a lot happier if it was there. I know I would be. I can't say for sure but it may be worth looking into "Magnetic Water Conditioning" But they don't remove anything, but they cause an electron excitation to occur in the water which may be helpful.