Our over wintering setup
With winter approaching we both thought it would be great to set up a system inside and bring on some small Koi.
I, (Nigel), had a small log cabin where I store my favourite toys, motorbikes. With a bit of careful arrangement we ended up with a space 3m wide and 2m depth.
Then we had a big slice of luck; a fish wholesaler had closed and we were offered as many tanks as we wanted ........ for free!
Grabbing a hire van we set off and came home 4 hours later with three of these tanks plus pumps, filters, UV's and a load of unopened treatments.
The tanks measuring 1m x 1.6m x 1m high, allowed us to fit three tanks side by side.
Bottom drains were fitted and concealed behind a grid.
The arrangement to allow water to leave the tanks was basic, but effective. The picture shows the pipe coming from the bottom drain which goes into a fitting before the elbow and this fitting allows the elbow to be rotated.
The water flows through the bottom drain, up the darker grey pipe at which point the water effectively overflows into the lighter grey pipe and off to the filtration.
By pushing the upright pipe, the bottom pipe rotates and thus the water level in the tank can be set at any level. During its use at the wholesalers, they would rotate the upright pipe to lower the water level when catching fish or they would turn off the supply into the tank, allowing the tank to be fully drained when the upright pipe is rotated through 90 degrees.
At the wholesalers this system worked well as their large filter system was in a pit below the tanks, allowing the water to flow out of the light grey pipe and straight into the filter below.
There were many option to connect the tanks to a filtration system but our decision was made easy when we realised we had nowhere to place a filter.
With outside not being an option and inside ruled out as I was not going to remove one of my motorbikes, we decided to build a sump filter below the tanks.
It’s not a massive filter but more than adequate. The water leaves the tanks as before, but after overflowing into the down pipe the water passes through a valve, into the horizontal manifold and ejects the water into the sump filter, bottom left of picture.
The sump is 3m by 1.8m by 0.2m and a filtration volume of over one cubic metre.
Cutting two holes into each tank allowed us to fit both an overflow and a inlet pipe. The flow into each tank is set by individual valves and there is a bypass valve which puts circa 60% of the water back into the start of the filter.
By closing the larger valve forces the water level to increase and thus causes the tank to overflow. This arrangement is to allow skimming of the tanks water periodically.
A few sheets of ply rescued from an old shed and a few lengths of 3 by 2 and its already to go.
