Ziks DIY Venturi Design

Soon after I had built my early design of Skippy style bio-filter and discussed it on one of the forums I enjoy, I received some advice from a guy named Zik on the forum. He sent me the following comments about venturi design and as a result we built a couple of pages about his design and the PDF article that Zik wrote.

This is what Zik said:

I have been making venturis for a few years now and have a very nice, easy to construct, adjustable venturi design that is scalable to fit many applications. It is able to easily draw to 2 feet depth even with a low head pressure pump such as a Danner mag drive model 7 (700gph @0 foot’ head). For this I use a ½” inch version. For in our main pond I use a mag drive 1800 with a 1” inch diameter venturi. Running at 2 feet or more really makes a difference in the amount of O2 that can be dissolved into the water (due to pressure at increased depth and longer contact of the air with the water as it raises to the surface).

As far as efficiency is concerned, venturis are amongst the most efficient ways to dissolve O2 into water, when they are designed and applied right. You may wish to look at this page http://home.att.net/~oxymax/aerate.htm as it is very informative. I have been to the pages you referenced on your website before, as well as many others including some that do not exist at this time. (Wish that wouldn’t happen!!)

If you are interested, I can send to you a copy of an article I have written on venturi design. I have it in adobe PDF format for easy viewing and printing. It is not a perfect article, but I did revise it a few times so it is done pretty well. Since that time I have taken to making larger venturis of basically the same design. You wouldn’t believe the amount of aeration you can get from a mag 1800 / 1 inch” venturi combo. I was in the middle of building and testing that venturi when I was writing the article, so it does not appear in the article. If you wish, I could take one of them apart and take pictures for you.

I understand very well the head pressure trade off vs. amount of work done. Poor design can rob you of a lot of head pressure which boils down to wasting energy from the pump. I would be interested in what you think of the design I have, if you care to build it and test one out. It would be interesting to know if it works as much better for your application as I think it will, as long as the flow rate isn’t more than your filter can use…

Following on Zik and I had several detailed discussions about improvements to venturis and bio-filters. Anyway the page we created can be seen at our Basic Venturi construction for the DIY crowd page, and you can also download the PDF document he refers to which contains pictures showing a novel tooth design to make a venturi more efficient.