Hello Folks!
In my ongoing effort to nail down a quiet and effective turf scrubber I have built a horizontal unit. It seems to me most people could use a horizontal unit rather than the vertical variety due to the height issues verticals present, for under tank, on-the-sump applications.
My first vertical incarnation,(viewtopic.php?f=3&t=98), was noisy, splashy, and a pain to clean. I had also used roughed up acrylic as my screen. The acrylic was a problem because, no matter how rough it was, cleaning would invariably strip large sheets of the turf off, right down to bare acrylic. This would make the screen surface very irregular so the falling water would disconnect from the screen and free fall causing much noise and splashing until new turf re-grew from scratch.
This Horizontal scrubber aims to improve several aspects over my original vertical TS:
1) No more falling water - so little or no splashing.
2) Quieter
3) Easier to clean - as it is basically a tray you pick up - no hooking or unhooking a screen from the header pipe.
4) Low profile
5) A more natural effective screen material.
The first four are pretty much self explanatory.
After the pain of my acrylic screen I had to stop and think about turf. I live next to the ocean so I went down and looked at the wild turf. It generally grows on exposed rock surfaces. The rock is porous with many tiny holes all over it. How could I simulate this? Turns out a friend is a major figure in ceramics in my town which is known for ceramics. Putting our heads together we came up with a way to to make a ceramic tray that is very porous.
So we made a tray out of clay with thousands of holes in it and a few hundred grooves down the face. We dried and fired it. It is, of course, unglazed.
I routed a face out of my original TS and laid it over. It's sitting directly on the tank's plastic surround ledge. I also put a drain pipe out to the tank on the opposite end from the water input side. I have some pendant lights that hang over my fuge. For the moment I have just commandeered them as they happen to be very easy to just swing over and drop into the top of my HZTS. Eventually when I get things working to my satisfaction I will switch to a custom LED light source to avoid the cost of burning thru a bunch of fluorescent bulbs.
Here is the overall view:
The ceramic screen: (Note the many little holes!)
The flow:
The present temporary lighting:
It has been running one day.