- Hey everyone, Cory from Aquarium Co-Op.
Today I'm going to show you how to make
a Kaldnes media filter, it's a fluidized bed.
And let me show you what they look like.
So here's one of them we've got running.
And this is a two-liter bottle,
it's weighted down, we're running air through it.
And the media itself is tumbling all the time,
and that tumbling action, one, cleans itself,
so that's a good thing.
Two, it only let's the strongest bacteria survive.
And that's the way you want it,
you want this nice tumble going.
And you can see in the center of the rings there
they're a little bit dirty,
but on the outside, they're real clean,
and so that's where all the really strong
bacteria is harbored.
And then we've got another one down here.
And you can see there, it's another two liter bottle.
And we're also show you how to make 'em
in a smaller variety, as well.
So stay tuned and we'll show you the build.
We're gonna build the DIY Kaldes media.
I've got one right here,
this was kind of a prototype at the beginning.
This is just a water bottle.
I used some gravel in it,
and this gravel, oddly enough,
if you look at it, it's kind of gray,
it started out as black gravel.
Well, what I found out was,
if you use an epoxy-coated gravel
this stuff that's gonna be bubbling around there,
it's gonna strip that coating off.
So I don't recommend that.
But you do want something to weigh it down
and then, gravel wasn't even enough,
so I used a magnet here.
That can be done as well.
I'll tell you what I prefer.
The best thing I found is these glass beads.
You can get 'em at a dollar store,
you can pick 'em up on Amazon,
I'll put a link down below
with all the supplies you're gonna need
to build this, including the media.
You buy the media on Amazon.
I don't remember exactly how much this was.
It might have been 13 bucks or 18 bucks,
or something like that.
Brand new media and this is K1 media.
There's different ones, but the K1's the one I use.
It's kind of got this star pattern in it.
The other supplies you're gonna want
to build one of these:
some air line tubing,
you'll need an air stone, I use the Never Clog air stones,
and you're gonna need a bottle of some sort.
I recommend one that has a cone shape at the top,
because what we want is we want air,
that's gonna come in at the bottom,
it's gonna rise up here, and we want it to tumble
all the media.
If it was a flat top, we'd get stuff that's stuck.
The other thing you need is a way
to make holes in a bottle.
You could use a drill, it's kind of a pain,
I don't like it nearly as much.
What I like to use is a soldering iron.
It melts right through plastic very quickly,
and you can make lots of holes
in a short time.
You can pick up a soldering iron
for usually 10, 12 bucks, sometimes less.
Harbor Freight has 'em, I think I saw 'em today
at like $3 or something.
But we're not gonna solder any solder,
we're actually just gonna melt plastic with it.
That's nice and hot.
We're gonna prep the bottle by taking off
the label here.
(plastic crumples)
All right, so label's off, you can clean this up a little
but you can wait while it's under water
for a couple weeks,
and this is a lot easier to get off.
You could get it off now if you want.
But what we need to do,
so typically there's a line on the bottom
of these two-liter bottles.
I like to fill that with what's gonna weight it down.
So I put my glass beads up to that line.
And then somewhere at the top we need to let air out,
'cause we're gonna put air through the bottom
and air's gonna come out the top.
So we know for sure we want holes
right around this line,
I'm gonna do a bunch of holes all the way around
so water can come in,
then we need the air to come out.
And then we're also gonna drill one in the cap,
the reason being is,
if I drill holes right all around here,
all this area up here is gonna fill with air
and so we have to have an escape at the top as well.
This is definitely one of those things
you probably should be doing outside
but it's raining and I need to shoot a video
and I don't want my camera to get wet.
We're gonna start by doing a hole in the cap.
Real easy here.
Definitely be very careful with a soldering iron,
they're crazy hot.
We're literally just gonna go
right through the center of it.
And it melts right through.
You see there's a bit of smoke there, melting plastic.
Try not to breathe much of that in.
Now we have a hole through it.
That was simple and quick.
So then we need to do holes in the bottle,
I'm gonna zoom in on that so you can see
how quick and fast that process will go.
You probably can't see very well
but there is a little line in the plastic here.
And we're just gonna make holes.
So I'm gonna dip right through,
you can see how fast that goes through.
You might want to do one every inch
or inch and half,
and you can just see how fast it melts through plastic
when you have a hot soldering iron.
So it's a fast job, for sure.
Definitely you don't want to be breathing
these fumes in,
this melting plastic can't be good for you.
Also wanna be careful,
if you touch that molten hot plastic
and it gets on your skin,
it stays on your skin till you can peel it off,
and I'm just gonna tell you from personal experience,
that hurts.
All right, so then, we need to do a top ring,
and let me adjust the camera here.
So we need to do a top ring
And usually I pick kinda right where,
you know, somewhere in this shoulder area,
where it's coming to it's point.
And I just kinda pick a point,
and then I kinda make a circle around.
So you just, right through.
And you just keep doing that.
And you can put more holes and things like that,
I don't necessarily think you need that many,
I just do as many as I think I'm gonna need.
You know, I could Swiss-cheese this thing,
but I'm not sure that's better.
Now that we've done all of our holes,
you can see here we've got lots of holes in this thing,
both top and bottom,
we can unplug the soldering iron
and put it off to the side so that no one's getting burned,
including ourselves.
You know, especially if you've got kids in the house,
that type of thing,
this thing will stay hot for quite a long time.
I'm just gonna leave it there,
and I'm gonna be mindful of it
while I'm letting it cool down.
So one of the next things we wanna do
is we wanna get our air line tubing,
and we wanna get our air stone,
and the goal is
we're gonna put the air line tubing
through one of these bottom holes,
and then we have to snake it all the way
through the top here.
Wow, what are the odds it'll come out the side?
That's gotta be like one in a million.
I'm trying to get it through the biggest hole
in the bottle,
and it goes for one of the small ones.
Almost there, it's gotta get,
there we go.
So you can see here we've got it
through the bottom on this side
and through the top over here.
We can now put
our air stone on.
You want to get a pretty good fit on there.
Now we just pull it back down through,
and this is where all the bubbles
are gonna come out to make our tornado action
or our circular action in this bottle here.
Next, we need something to weigh it down.
I have used gravel and crushed coral,
what I found was something that fine
trapped a lot of fish poop down here.
I found that these beads don't do that.
And at a dollar or whatever low price these are
and the weight you get,
it makes a lot of sense.
So now the worst part of this project happens
and that's getting all of this stuff into the bottle.
Now if you're gonna make a bunch of these,
what I recommend is you get yourself a bottle
and you cut off this and it makes a funnel.
And that makes it pretty easy.
Being that I'm just doing a couple today
or one for a video,
'cause I've already made a bunch,
I'm just gonna use my hands.
And so, I'm just gonna show you
kind of how painful that is,
but you kind of just
(glass beads clattering)
go in here.
And then we'll cut to the part where
that part's done,
and we'll show you the next part.
We've got lots of little green stones in here,
nice and heavy now,
when we put this into an aquarium
or a pond or something like that,
it's gonna sink right away.
Now we've gotta get media in there.
And that's kind of the same process.
The important part is when you have new media
it doesn't tumble at all,
it doesn't tumble very well.
And so what happens is
everyone wants to maximize their bottle here,
and they're gonna crank this thing full.
And my recommendation is, fill it halfway,
so up to this halfway mark,
and just call it a day.
And then you can come back
in two months, three months,
something like that and get some more in there.
You can get it up to 3/4 full and get it tumbling.
I usually don't even bother with that,
'cause these things are so efficient
at breaking down ammonia and nitrite
that I don't even worry about that.
But I basically fill it about halfway,
so I can get a good tumbling going.
And I'm gonna do that now,
and then we'll check in after that,
and I'll show you installing in a tank,
and things like that.
All right, we've got roughly halfway,
maybe a little bit less than halfway.
We're gonna put our cap back on.
And looks like we've got probably
a little more than half left.
That's because this is a two-liter bottle
and this is a gallon of
Kaldnes media.
So in theory, you might be able
to make three or four of these
out of one bag, so that's pretty efficient.
I'm going to connect this up,
and I'm gonna show it to you side by side,
next to those ones that were already cycled.
All right, so I've got one of the cycled ones
up out of the tank,
and you can see how much media's in there,
and you can see the color.
The color's kind of a brown,
and that means it's fully cycled with bacteria.
We've got the brand new one we just built
right down here.
I'm gonna put them side by side,
just to do a little bit of teaching
and educating here.
So we're letting this kind of fill up with water
as it sinks.
All right, so you can see the two color differences,
and that's how you know when your media is cycled.
That's probably the biggest downfall
to this type of filter.
While it's crazy, crazy efficient,
they use it in commercial fish farms
and all kinds of stuff,
saltwater facilities, you know,
if you're watching this video,
you've probably read about how good it is.
It is very efficient.
That being said, it might take you,
three or six months to get your media
looking like this, and working this well.
Now let me start turning some air on over here.
So we're starting to turn the air on,
and I'm just gonna let it go full blast here.
And you see it's not doing anything yet.
It literally just isn't doing anything.
And that's usually what it does
for the first day or two.
If you really are struggling,
you can take some more media out,
but it takes a while for it to start moving
on its own,
and that's the downfall.
You build this filter, you're super-excited,
you want it to be doing this,
you see it in videos doing that,
instead you get this.
And you're going, "Well, that's not doing anything."
Aeration is important, but more isn't always better.
When I first built some, I thought,
"well, maybe I just don't have enough air,
"and that's why I'm not getting this."
But I should be able to turn this down,
it'll still work just fine,
'cause I've run it under relatively low
relatively low air,
and I just have to find the hose to do that.
In theory, it's gonna be right here,
okay, so I can turn it down.
And I've just got a little valve here
that I'm doing that with.
But we can slow the flow down,
and it doesn't take that much flow.
It does take a decent amount to get it started
when you're first cycling it
but once
I may have turned it all the way off there.
So you can see where
it's running the same build as this one over here.
And I can just turn on a little bit of air,
let's see, that much air,
and it's gonna fluidize, look at that.
So barely any air.
If I turn it back off, I can just demonstrate that again.
And the reason why this works so well
and why this media is kind of expensive for plastic,
is it's neutrally buoyant.
And so that means when bacteria colonizes on it
it is basically perfectly buoyant
to flow in the water, and that's what gives it
that tumbling action so well.
We're just gonna turn on a little bit of air again.
There's a tiny little bit going,
if I just increase that a tiny bit,
I think it'll start going again.
Of course it's not increasing fast,
there we go.
Let's see, is that quite enough?
It's starting, it might.
You know it's starting to do its thing.
I would say you would need more airflow than that.
That should be almost any pump.
Just a little bit more and you can see,
now it's really moving.
And that's what you want,
is you want everything constantly moving in there
all the time.
And so I barely have it going very fast,
this one's really cranking it out,
and yet it's still not moving because it's not cycled,
it doesn't have the weight of the bacteria on it
to make it move,
or to keep it moving middle water.
I can keep it going this slow,
or I can crank it up, and I can allow a lot more
air to go in here.
That's how you make your own K1 filter.
You can use any bottle that's cone shaped.
The biggest thing here is having the cycled media.
It does help if you already have one of these going,
like if I take a handful out of here,
and I put it into there, this is gonna seed a lot faster
and get going for me.
But if I was to chime in tomorrow,
you'd probably see a little bit of action going in here,
barely, it'd be all.
You know, it wouldn't be very fluid, like this.
But as time goes on, this will get better.
And that's what you're waiting for, is just that.
Once you have a really seeded filter like this,
it really will process a lot of waste.
You know, I've got 300 yellow Labs in this 75 gallon
and this is tearing through waste,
and I can power feed 'em and things like that.
The one thing you wanna watch out for,
in these holes down here,
if I had really tiny fry, let's say guppy fry.
Or shrimp.
I've had shrimp get stuck in here,
and so it's not good for that.
But any tank where you've got decent sized fish
great for koi ponds, that type of thing,
you can run these in your sumps,
in a fish room like this.
They're just very efficient at breaking down waste.
They are not very efficient at looking good.
There's no doubt about that.
You could build one that looks decent probably
but this is quick down and dirty,
probably 20 bucks or less to get it done.
You might be able to use parts you have,
like two-liter bottle, you probably have air line tubing,
you might have an air stone,
so really you're just buying some media
and some little glass beads
and you're good to go.
Thanks for watching this video.
I'll be making more videos.
Every Friday we put out another video
on either how I'm breeding something
how I'm building something, something like that.
Thursdays are my day in the fish room
where I'm shooting videos like this,
showing you what else I'm doing.
I am not always showing you how I do it,
but eventually everything gets shown.
But you're gonna see progress in my fish room,
and that's everything behind me there.
And then on Tuesdays we've got the quick tip,
where in about two minutes or less
I show you something cool that you can implement
into your routine for your fish room
or your fish tanks.
And then Sunday we have real fish talk
with Lamont and myself,
and we tackle issues of questions
you guys bring up,
and we use our knowledge to answer
as best we can.
So until next time, we'll see you in the next video.