JKB ,I have no clue what the surface area is. There are about 3500 balls the size of a golfball with around 50-100 small spines sticking out of each ball. Rainman, that looks awesome I will have to look into the fluidized sand filter thanks for the great info. Weissguy, thanks for your advise also and the great fish that seem to be doing well for now. Let's hope there are no catastrophies like last year.
Bio balls work pretty well, and they are commonly used in greenwater growing systems for tilapia where other bio filtration methods would be difficult to impossible to use because of the massive collection of algae in the filters. Ideally, your bio ball filter should be it's own separate unit for easy cleaning and backwashing, but I think your filter will do fine for what you are wanting from it. Fluidized sand filters work tremendously well in my experience, but you have to be incredibly careful with them for the first 30-40 days of use as they can actually cause more issues than they are meant to fix in this time period. I have the same FSF as Rainman. They are pretty slick if used correctly, and for under $100 you can't really go wrong. A lot of people talk of tank-wide fish kills using FSF filters, and this is primarily due to the fact they didn't cycle them properly before putting massive loads on them. As long as they are properly cycled, they have a very unique ability of adapting to the bio load in your system extremely quickly. Not a lot of biofilters are so flexible, particularly for the footprint.
No problem John. Make sure to give me a call or email if you have any problems/issues. This new system you've got going should be a lot safer and reliable than the previous one. You'll have to come out to my new facility when it's finished. It will be geared primarily to hatchery type functions, but there will still be plenty of growout tanks too.
