Active Bed Bio Media. SuperActiFlo give you unsurpassed performance. No cleaning required. Ever!

Our Active Bed Bio Media is of a design that targets the growth of beneficial nitrifying bacteria used in Koi pond bio filters. The biological filtration performance from the media is amazingly high thanks to its unique qualities.

SuperActiFlo Active Bed Media. Approx 15mm diameter & 7.5mm in length

Active Bed Media offers aerobic performance and a difficult to equal biological filtration performance, exceeding all other static media including Japanese matting on a volume for volume basis.

Active Bed Media - Delivering more performance per volume.

Active Bed Media  has a high specific surface area per volume of about 860 m2 / m3. This is not it's only unique attribute however and it is rather the way the media has been designed to operate that sets it apart from others.

Active Bed Media has been carefully designed to be slightly positively buoyant in water. This means that it is remarkably easy to agitate and large quantities of it can be easily agitated by a column of air bubbles.

The agitation process is critical to the media's performance. Agitation by air is also important rather than agitation by a pump or jet of water.

The wheel shape of the Active Bed Media with ridges is what gives it a large surface area to volume ratio but this is almost incidental to the real benefits of the media.

Because agitation takes place by using air, the water surrounding the media is kept constantly at or very near to oxygen saturation levels.

As we know that the nitrifying Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter bacteria use 4.3 mg of oxygen for every mg of ammonia reduced to nitrates, you can see that oxygen is a critical element to the process.

This abundance of oxygen ensures that the entire filter is run under completely aerobic conditions. This means the bacteria in the Active Bed Media media are all beneficial and the opportunity for unwanted heterotrophic bacteria to grow is reduced to zero.

There is another substantial benefit in that water returned to the pond is oxygen rich and not oxygen depleted as in the case of other bio filters.

Even better, the moving bed itself has substantial benefits. Because the media are constantly bumping into each other, any dirt that happens to be present in the bio filter is likely to be knocked off. This keeps the media self cleaning and self cleaning media means that the bacterial colonies are less likely to be disturbed or destroyed by needing to be cleaned regularly as happens with most static media.

Remember that these beneficial nitrifying bacteria are very slow growing, and in some lesser filtration systems can take months to fully re-establish themselves. Any disturbance to the bacteria colonies is to be avoided wherever possible!

Under extreme circumstances, if the media ever does have to be cleaned, you can clean half of it at a time, preserving as much bio filtration capacity as possible. The ease of accessing the media from your filters is simply a case of opening them up!

The limited biological filter disturbance has obvious benefits, especially if you happen to be a Koi!

The bumping and banging of the bio media against each other also has the benefit of continually scraping off the bio film on the outside of the wheel. This ensures that old dead bacteria are scraped off, encouraging the growth of young and hungry active bacteria.

Within the central hub of the wheel the bacterial colony is well protected and here can live out a natural life cycle to maturity.

Active bed bio media is not porous which means that no clogging of fine pores can occur as happens with expensive ceramic bead type media. Ceramics are at a disadvantage - despite the massive surface area to volume ratio which is great in theory, the tiny capillaries and pores that give the media this massive surface area tend to clog quickly with fine solid particles, algae and the bacteria themselves. All you end up with is an expensive marble with relatively little surface area to volume ratio.

Bio filter speed is everything

Ever wonder why other manufacturers are reluctant to quote specifics on the performance parameters of their bio media? Simply put, the specifications aren't quoted because they can't be guaranteed. Under ideal circumstances, which would have to be clearly defined a measurement might be attained but whether the media would attain the same performance under differing circumstances in different ponds is highly unlikely.

Active bed media however will consistently deliver the same performance from pond to pond. All you have to do is keep it relatively free from solid wastes, even though it is far more forgiving than any other bio media, solids offer heterotrophic bacteria an opportunity to cause problems!

The CRITICAL POINT that HAS to be understood is the SPEED of operation. A very small bioreactor with only a small colony of bacteria WILL get rid of all ammonia in a pod, given enough time. Whether the Koi survive to see the completion of the process is an entirely separate argument.

In nature, waste (ammonia) produced by Koi is almost instantly reduced in concentration to negligible levels because of the sheer vastness of the water body that they live in. In a Koi pond however, even small amounts of ammonia quickly build up to concentrations that become lethal in short order.

In order to replicate the natural environment of Koi the SPEED of ammonia breakdown into nitrites and these in turn to nitrates is CRITICAL to the health of your Koi. If the bio filter cannot rapidly process any waste produced, these wastes will linger in ever diminishing concentrations until they are eventually removed. This simply isn't good enough.

Think about it in human terms. When a Koi lives in a lake, it has the equivalent space of the Empire State building all to itself (37 million cubic feet) . In a Koi pond, this space is reduced to the equivalent of a 10' x 10' x 10' room, less than one tenth of one floor.

This means that the filtration system in a Koi ponds has to be 1 000 times more effective than that which occurs naturally in Mother Nature.

These are big numbers and worse, they're conservative, erring on the side of low stocking rates in Mother Nature.

When it comes Koi, you can never have too much bio filtration. You can only have too little. Active Bed Bio Media ensures that you are always on the right side of the equation...