Radial Flow Settler for Aquaponics Systems | How RFS work - How to Size Your RFS

g'day folks it's rob here and in today's clip we're going to be running through how a radial flow settler works it's that little blue job' there the best place to locate it within your system and also a few tips on how to size it so you can make it as efficient as possible at removing solids from your system [Music] you [Music] radial flow settlers have been used around the world for years in wastewater treatment plants because there are a very efficient method of removing solids from water columns and that makes them an ideal little job' for us to knock together and pop in our own aquaponic systems now some folks call these radial flow settlers wall filters while they do look similar from the outside the mechanics in removing solids from the water are very different in fact there's a great little paper that you can research yourself I'll pop a link down in the description that runs through a comparison between the two in a cold water aquaculture setting so yeah check that out if you are need a little bit of convincing as to what's better just to let you folks know that I have filmed a clip looking at how this is all job' was put together and that will be uploaded very soon to youtube so you can check out that link down in the description once it's posted to the channel now I'll grab the camera and we'll have a bit of a gander at how this little Joby works so to run through how these filters work we really do need to start in the fish tank here so what we have in the center is a solids lifting outlet and down the bottom what happens is the solids are picked up along with the water you're taken up to the top of the Soler's lifting outlet travels along the pipe there and then out through the side wall of the tank now the pipework then travels down I've got a valve in mine just to make cleaning a little bit easier and that pipe runs through to another sweeping Bend that redirects the pipe vertically inside a stilling well and it terminates towards the top of the filter and you may actually be able to see a few small bits of solid come through there now this stilling well has a larger volume of water in it so they're entering water slows down in velocity slightly and it is then redirected downwards towards the base of the stilling well there that water with the solids in it is introduced into a larger volume of water so the velocity slows further again and the majority of the solids will then precipitate out of the water column and settle on the base of the vessel then in a small little DIY settler setup like this the water then exits at the top of the vessel through the sidewall into a pipe where then moves out to the next component within the system now in some commercially produced an excellent homemade DIY sellers like this one from Robert lega lega farm the water exits the main chamber over a weir that runs the circumference of the vessel itself now this larger collection area of the ware helps to slow the velocity further allowing more solids to fall from suspension out of the water column and collect on the base of the vessel that water circulates around the weir until it exits through a pipe in the side of the vessel just like the DIY ones we make and then moves on to the next component in your system and many thanks quickly to Robert from bigelow brook farm for allowing me to use his footage a link to his radial flow several clip can be found in the description and dinner Rob also includes a closer look at the DIY we assistant he made up for his unit few folks who may be interested in having a crack at making up one for your own now as you've already seen in my DIY settlers so far I've relied on a simple pipe that comes through the side but you can also knock together something like this this is something I'm just playing around with at the moment it actually plugs into the pipe on the inside of the settler there and basically what it does is create a larger area for the water to flow over into these channels basically slowing down the water velocity yet again and allowing more solids to fall out of suspension towards the base of the settler itself this one is still a work in progress I just need to work out some bracing just to bring it up to level so we get a nice even flow rate out of the settler at all times so now onto the solid side of things so basically what we have now is the load that solids down on the base of the drum itself now in Rob's you would have noticed that he has a conical base on the bottom of his settler and that allows all those solids to congregate near the drain pipe so he can then just open up a valve and the bulk of them come out straight away now us DIYs who don't have the budget or in some cases don't have access to those conically based vessels we can use these flat bottom Thanks this is just a simple 50 gallon 200 liter was like the drum that I've modified and as I mentioned we'll be posting a clip on soon and in the base of this I have a very simple DIY drain that sits on the base that allows the solids to be drawn out I've got mine set off the ground just a little bit and what I do is I plug a pump into this little valve fitting here and then turn that on and all the waste runs out to our lime tree down the back where I'm using the fish waste to give it a bit of a feed so just quickly I have had some people raised concerns that when we remove the fish waste from the system the we will be depriving the nutrients from the plants in the hydroponic side now while this is the case some nutrients will be leaving the system there is more than enough in there to keep the plants happy and healthy and I'll link to our paper down in the description below that covers this in more detail so please don't listen to the self-proclaimed gurus online as long as your fish a well-fed you should have very happy plants as well now back to the fish muck now the filter should be cleaned at least once a week to prevent any of those captured solids from decomposing in the base of the drum and releasing potentially toxic compounds into the system water and you're also going to find that you'll most likely need to clean the filter a little bit more regularly as the volume of feed you give your growing fish increases and when it comes to what to do with those solids once they're removed from the system you actually have a few choices they can be pumped out onto your fruit trees as I mentioned we do here or onto vegie beds just to give them a bit of a good feed and another option is to reclaim some of the nutrients by processing them in an offline mineralization system basically blasting a lot of air through there for the bacteria to mineralize the organics down into plant available nutrients there will be a clip posted to the channel once I build owls for this system here but they're just two ways that you can reclaim those solids so they don't go to waste just quickly before we move on as I did mention I will be posting a build clip for this little Joby here and it will pop up up there once it's posted to YouTube or there will be a link down in the description if you want to be sent a notification once it's uploaded or any of my other aquaponic clips we need to do is click on that subscribe button and then pound on the Bell icon and YouTube will hopefully send you a notification once they're uploaded to the channel now back to the settler so now as to where to position the settler itself as I mentioned before we have the water the wastewater coming up through the base of the soils lifting outlet so I really do think it should be positioned directly after the fish tank itself another thing to consider is the outlet pipe within the stilling will needs to be below the outlet pipe in the fish tank itself now if that was higher obviously the water would back up to that level and the fish tank could potentially overflow in consideration also needs to be given to the height of the outlet pipe from the filter itself now I've got my system set up as a split flow so it is lower than the grow beds but if you were to set up your system so the water left the radial flow settler and then moved on to the grow beds the outlet would have to be higher than the grow beds so the water could travel in the single loop and if you want a better explanation on a single loop and split flow you can check out that little clip up there gives a few examples of different aquaponic system builds another thing to consider is how you're going to remove the waste from the base as I mentioned before I pop a pump onto alves and run it out the back I've also got it off the ground just a little bit in case I decide to do it via gravity I can just pop a hose in there turn the valve on and I can run it out to what will potentially be a little lawn area out the back there just to feed up the grass and give it a bit of a water if we want to do that I prefer to send it to the fruit trees but it's just an option now if I wasn't going to use a pump what I would have done is raised it up even further again so I could have put a bucket underneath it and then a bucket the solids out either to the mineralisation tank or out into the garden so height is another thing to consider when you're designing where the settle is going to be just to make it easier to remove the solids when it comes time to clean out the base of the vessel and just quickly I do have an extra little bit of pipe work come out the side of the settler there and an explanation of that be included in how to build clip but just briefly what it allows me to do is remove a lot of the clean water from the settler before I start removing the source so I do get to reclaim some of it and the whole 200 litres or 50 gallons doesn't go to waste so now we've sorted out where we want to position our filter we can start thinking about what size of settler vessel we actually need to do the job so basically it comes down to the larger the vessel the greater amount of time the water will stay in that vessel allowing more solids to fall out of suspension now one term to explain the length of time the water stays in the vessel is called a retention time now for us back yard is anything over two minutes retention time will collect the bulk of the large solids with around six minutes being what I try to aim for to help remove the bulk of the solids from the water column now ten minutes plus would be fantastic but the size of the vessel required would be prohibitive for most of us backyard aquaponics as you'll see in a tick now it's quite easy to work out what size vessel you need for a given retention time you can do it in liters or gallons it doesn't really matter the equation is the same and I'll use ours as a bit of an example so what we want to do is turn the retention time into a fraction of an hour so I want a six minute retention time in a system that has a 2000 litre an hour flow rate from the fish tank into the settler itself so first of all the fraction of time six minutes divided by 60 gives us 0.1 the flow rate is two thousand so 0.1 times 2,000 gives us two hundred so I require a 200 liter vessel which I coincidentally have to give me a six minute retention time for our system here now let's say we wanted to be more like the big boys the commercial guys and have a longer attention time somewhere closer to 15 minutes what we do is we divide 15 minutes by one hour to give us a fraction and that's 0.25 multiply that by the flow rate 2,000 liters an hour and that gives us 500 so I would need a vessel 500 liters in volume to be able to give me a 15-minute retention time and as you can see from my little area here I definitely don't have the space and also to the cost of a drum that is 500 liters in volume is rather expensive for us down here so for me I'm just going to stick with my little 200 liter job' and a six minute retention time so there you go there's a bit of a gander at what's a radial flow settler is how it works where to position it and also a couple of pointers on sizing it if you have found the clip to be helpful would be fantastic if you could share it around your different social networks family and friends I would really appreciate that and don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you would like to be brought up to date when I post new clips to the channel here on aquaponics before I go really do need to thank those awesome folks who are helping to support the channel on the farm your own yard membership site where folks get bonus content and also through the YouTube and membership platform as well really do appreciate it folks be great if you could check out my super supporters links to their Facebook pages and websites are in the description down below to be fantastic if you could check out what they're all about I do hope you're all well and happy and your gardens and aquaponics are booming and I will catch you all next clip cheers folks and have a top one

Channel: Rob Bob's Aquaponics & Backyard Farm

Views: 144,456

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Id: sBCC9tMsleY

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020