Biomatic pond filter: update

The pond filter works, quite well. It has up to this point been fairly “biomatic” that is to say, the filter has not needed cleaning (although I have wet-harrowed it several times) and has worked with naturally occurring biological removal of pathogens – it is biomatic, so in my writing I will call these pond filters “biomatic pond filters”, or in the case of rainwater filters, “biomatic water filters”. These filters do not need backwashing – ever; in fact “backwashing” (forcing water backwards through the output to “break up” the “fouled” sand) will ruin them. For some reason there is lots of misunderstanding about the difference between a rapid sand filter and a slow sand filter. People need to get over this idea that all sand filters need to be backwashed. Perhaps some of the confusion comes from lack of knowledge, and the (deliberate?) lack of available information. For the past 40 or 50 years, sand filters have been designed to work using chemicals like chlorine or ozone to kill pathogens in the output water. This is old, non-sustainable, profit centered technology. And furthermore, chlorine and ozone are, for all intents and purposes, ineffective in preventing disease from cryptosporidium (cryptosporidiosis), or giardia lamblia (Giardiasis often called “Beaver fever”) acquired from the cyst form of these pathogens. These are two different diseases and Beaver Fever is NOT caused by cryptosporidium. The beneficial microbes in Slow sand filters (biomatic filters) remove these pathogens from water – by not just killing them, but by actually removing them in the process of consuming them and breaking them down into harmless elements.