refilling a home charcoal filter tank

[sales]

I need to replace my charcoal filtler water tank in my basement but I don't want to buy a whole new tank ready to go if all I need do is refill the present tank with charcoal and other media. I just saw a video on this and it doesn't seem to be that difficult.

Any one know about this stuff, I don't

thanks

[The Daring Dufas]

want to buy a whole new tank ready to go if all I need do is refill the present tank with charcoal and other media.

Mr. Sales, it may help if you were to let the readers of the group know the brand and model number of the unit you own. You may also consider posting a picture to a free image sharing website then including a link to it in your next post. There are a number of knowledgeable, friendly and nice folks who post to this newsgroup who would be glad to help you with your problem. Just don't mention WD40. ^_^

TDD

[nestork]

I expect any pet shop would sell activated carbon for filtering the water in aqariums.

Activated carbon is really fairly simple to understand. It is made out of baking natural plant materials or coal in the absence of air to produce charcoal. This charcoal will have gazillions of tiny pores in it (from the plant cells that were baked), or gazillions of tiny microscopic cracks in the coal. These pores or cracks greatly increase the surface area of the charcoal, and organic matter flowing through the charcoal will be "adsorbed" onto the surface of the charcoal.

The German company "Siemens" is a major producer of activated carbon for use in the industrial water filtration systems they make:

'Activated Carbon'

and I expect that if you e-mailed them asking for advice on what kind of activated carbon you need for your filter, they'd help you out. You could ask them who sells their activated charcoal in your area, and perhaps buy some from them for your filter.

Alternatively, simply Google "activated carbon", and you'll find plenty of companies selling the stuff.

I've been told that charcoal made from roasting coconut shells makes for excellent activated carbon because coconut shell is a very hard "wood" and that means the cells are much smaller than normal hard or soft wood cells and that results in a finer "filter", but I don't know if that's true or not. Other woods, like ebony and cocobolo are harder than coconut shell, but coconut shell doesn't have any other useful purpose for which it can be sold, and so I expect they use it for making activated charcoal cuz it's cheap as dirt.

Also, my understanding is that activated charcoal is also called "catalytic carbon" because it's a natural catalyst, and that leaves open the possibility of re-activating the charcoal by baking it in an oven so that the organic matter adsorbed to the catalytic carbon surface reacts with oxygen and gets burnt out of the charcoal, thereby cleaning that carbon surface and effectively "re-activating" it. I've heard that activated charcoal can be re-activated, but I don't know the process or how effective it would be. Maybe talk to someone at Siemens about re-activating your existing charcoal. Perhaps even the packages of activated charcoal you buy at a pet shop would advise you on how to do this, or you can just google "re-activating charcoal" to find a procedure to follow.

If you try to re-activate your charcoal, some of the carbon is going to react to form carbon dioxide and be driven off as a gas, so you're going to need a bag of pet store activated charcoal anyhow to top up the level of charcoal in your filter.

Hope this helps.