Welcome to Ramcat's Home Page

Everyone I run into wants to know what Ramcat means. I found a stray kitten with long jet black hair, and named him Taflac. He used to wake me in the morning by ramming his head into my face. That is how he picked up the name Ramcat, which nickname I liked so I chose it for my alias. No, you won't find another picture of a cat on this web page. I just think that your real name for your identity on the internet is boring. Aliases show some of your personality and bring more life to the net.

For now my home page is going to be devoted to what I call the Asellus Particle Filter. Here will be pictures and information I know about this amazing new koi pond filter.

For those of you who want to jump right to the design of the filter go here.

Let me start the story from the begining: My pond looked like this:
Dirty water koi pond

It didn't always look like this, when my fish were small it only got this way in the late summer. The primary reason my pond looked like this is I had no particle filtration to speak of. I tried several things and the only one that worked was open-cell foam filter that I had to clean every day. Well if you wash fish poop out of a sponge every day, it only takes one summer to get sick of it (ok, I know I should have been sick of it after a week but I'm a die hard koi fanatic (koi kichi)).

I was certain that I could replicate the effect of the open-cell foam filter with a mechanical device. I tried "The Answer" but it did not work. Then I began to experiment with adding some settling chambers - still no effect because of the size of my pond (8786 gallons (at the time)).

Then I was reading on koiphen.com and ran across this post. I followed the post until it ended, as you can see not well - too much culture and language barrier. Then to make a long story short I followed the story to the french koi board and learned from the creator of the filter (EricB/Bono).

There were many who challenged me and encouraged me through the winter of 07/08. And taking the leap of faith I began construction in Mar 08. This is the result:

The relection you see from the bottom of my pond is over 8 feet down (deepest part of pond is 10 1/2 feet). This is the construction thread of my pond (from 2000/2001). This is the construction of the new Asellus filter (2008).

Now how does this magic happen - a small crustation eats all the trapped particles that settle on the media. Here are some images of the asellus:

This is a small series of before and after pictures. "Before" primarily highlights my poor water quality, and "After" shows the improved water quality and a small progression of asellus cleaning some open-cell foam.

The Before: The After:

Again the light you see on the bottom of the pond is 8 feet down!

How long did all this take? The filter was mostly built in one day (a Saturday) all the parts were bought previously and everything was on site for the day of the build. The results took about one month, see below:

22 March 2008

10 Apr 2008

12 Apr 2008

4 May 2008

The Before:	The After:




	Again the light you see on the bottom of the pond is 8 feet down!