Thread: Trickle tower (Manky Sanke design) - my experience

As promised I want to post here some of my experiences regarding trickle towers. Initial design is made by Manky Sanke. I just add some few more features.

Total height of one tower is around 2m. Working media height is around 1.6 - 1.7m. Each tower contains about 400 liters of HEL-X 13KLL+.

Towers are 100% air tight - at least I think they are. Each place where there is some kind of connection (one barrel to another one) or connecting screws - there is plenty of silicone out there. Top cover is also sealed by silicone. Both barrels stand in a tray with water, so no air can enter from the bottom.

Water is spread by a drip plate - this is the only way to get media evenly supplied in water - tested some other solutions, but this one is just the best. On the bottom there is a stainless steel grill to separate media from the water.

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This was the first design (with pipe outlet at the bottom) but in the end, after some tests and problems, I decided to cut it, add some more height by using another half of a barrel and putting whole construction into the tray with water.

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Final result looks like this.

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Two tower are feed by one pump. They have some valves at the top to make the water distributed evenly across both of them (one is a little bit lower which causes problems with exact same water volume distribution). Lowest possible flow for each barrel is around 35 l/h - 420 l/d. Fastest is around 650 l/h - 15 600 l/d.

For the first two months or more (do not remember) I left them with a flow of around 70 l/h, so very low. After that time I tested NITRATEs in water out - no change at all. Then I tested them daily and found that plenty of times water out had higher NITRATEs than water in. Or was that because my test has about 20% accuracy - I do not now. I do know however that the towers dealt with all the AMMONIA and NITRITEs perfectly. Every time I had some spike of those two, water out was completely free of them.

Then I decided to trim the flow down to lowest setting - 35 l/h. Left the barrels for another two or three weeks. Same situation, no changes at all in NITRATE levels at the water out.

My NITRATEs are almost all the time in the range of 60 - 80 PPM. Pump takes water to the towers from the BIO CHAMBER - just after a drum.

I do not know why they are not working as designed to be. Maybe someone has any ideas about what went wrong here? Much appreciate!

Last photo (6) shows max flow, which is now. After failure with low and a little bit more flow I have decided to test it that way now.

With flow in range 35-70 l/h I do not think it is too fast. I will set those two scenarios once again and show how slow it is. Literally just a trickle.