Blog 17/01/12.

How water actually moves forward constantly as a ‘block’ in Eric Filters is something that’s hard for many readers to understand.

In truth the reason for this is a combination of the narrow width (20” or 500mm), the shallow water depth (20” or 500mm) and the 9” dia/23mm central end baffle set off the end wall only some 1”/25mm from the suction inlet of the water pump.

However, despite the detailed verbal explanation on my part, many have still questioned the theory and have indicated that photographic or video evidence would be much easier to grasp.

I have often wondered how this evidence could be shown but hadn’t any real idea as to how to go about it.

Two days ago Les Bean, an Eric owner, who posts on several Koi forums as ‘Chag05’ came up with this video that demonstrates the moving block perfectly and I have his permission to put it onto the website – Les, thanks a million!

Experiment on water movement through filter. from chag05_Les on Vimeo.

Aside from Les’s choice of 70’s background music (and of course, that particular song was there for obvious reasons) the video shows off the theory perfectly without any media barriers or aeration – just the simple flow-pattern that’s achieved in all Eric units.

The idea behind it all is to pass that endless forward-moving block of water, aided by vertical turbulence, through these EricMat barriers along the travel.

Within Eric boxes and in this situation, I really do not know of any other media that can be anything quite like as biologically active!

The unit in question was an Eric Three, which holds only 84 gallons or 385 litres of water and it took 4.5 minutes for the entire 84 gallons of cloudy water to exit the box and be replaced with new water, which indicates that the water pump was operating at a 1,120gph flow-rate and this was also confirmed by Les.

I hope the video also demonstrates how quickly and easily the brush box and EricMat blocks can be removed and replaced to show the box below to be perfectly clean.

Waddy.