***The Pond Discussion Thread****

Renovating a peaceful corner of my garden where I built a pond years ago. There's a waterfall feature and I used to have fish in the pond but a sneaky Heron ate them all. More than once. So now I just have frogs, toads, the odd Newt and a massive water lilly which has overwhelmed the pond. One annoying issue was maintaining the water level as there is (I think) a small leak somewhere in the upper pool/splash pool area which defies precise detection. That together with evaporation meant topping up was required at least once a week. The main pond does not leak - no loss at all with the waterfall powered down, but I like to keep it running to keep the water sweet. Anyway, to resolve this, yesterday I installed an automatic water level valve and it seems to work OK. Birds queue up to bathe in the top pool in hot weather. Fair bit of work to do yet with surrounding plants. My dogs have to investigate everything and Hazel (the cockapoo) has fallen in the pond several times - I suspect on purpose.





 
As the outlaws are over, we had a little trip and ended up with two smallish additional Koi - Marco (black and white Kumonryu) & Polo (Asagi) - as named by the kids.

Both seem to be doing well - Marco is looking at the Rin Gin koi going "that's a big fish" but didn't seem too stressed, and Polo has been following the mature fish and stuffing itself now it doesn't have hundreds of other fish to compete against.

Photos to follow once they've settled down.

Now that really is the last koi purchases.
 
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Currently uploading..

I noted that one of the large fish has clocked itself against something straight edged - so that could be brick but I will keep an eye on that. I suspect flukes. Only issue is we've got messed up weather here with some storms/rain which may also be part of the issue. problem is I'm not going to be able to catch this to treat it, easily. Human is tolerated, Human with net.. nope.
 
Bought a pair of decorative Storks though I doubt they'll do anything to scare off our local Heron. I have no fish in the pond now since the Heron ate them all. Twice. I'll stay with frogs :-) I'm going to have to thin that water lilly out a bit because it's outgrown the pond..


 
Talking of herons, I had one visit at the end of last week. I've got a net over most of my pond, but the iris had grown too much and I had to leave one part uncovered. Typically, it's been fine like this for a couple years, but I came home to find one of my fish in the middle of the lawn, pecked to pieces.
 
Did a ~6000 litre (~40%) water swap today.. the fish seem happier and they're on a diet for now until I can measure the Nitrite+Nitrate levels again. No ammonia just higher levels because I've probably been over feeding them and the plants seemed to have stopped growing early compared to previous years. Not sure if that's water or a weather issue.

I caught two come up for air and pulling from above the water, and they seemed not to be too happy so I did a full set of tests. All good except the NO2 and NO3 were high. Issue is that if there's high Nitrite it can cause something cause brown blood disease which is basically low oxygen in the fish and causes internal organ damage too if not stopped.

It also causes them to get irritated too hence thinking two symptoms together = danger. They seem a lot more relaxed now, and I fed them a small amount to ensure they're not stressed.

It also meant I got to have a look at re-balancing the flow rates so there's quite a fast flow to remove those bits and I moved the plants away from the skimmer too.
 
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It certainly is a balancing act and can be tricky to get rght again once it runs away.
I learnt the hard way a couple of years ago with overfeeding, setting my autofeeder to feed 3 times a day whilst on holiday.....forgetting to turn it off also didn't help.
I don't even bother with the feeder when away any more, I bag a small amount of daily feed and get a relative to call and throw it in (much safer).
 
I'll redo the test tomorrow evening and see but with the rebalanced flow, the plants moved away from the skimmer it's helped water clarity immensely.

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I think for my next DIY addition will be a protein skimmer. This is only going to get worse as the fish grow.

I have some 4” pipe and various fittings. I though about putting it together in the pond as a part of the airlifts but the mess has to go somewhere where it will be flushed. So it makes sense is that it uses the waste pipe from the RDF. I have an electrical port in the distribution board free so I could run a small pump with a solenoid/valve for air and possibly use a water solenoid to flush the foam periodically.

The man things are:
* small bubbles - so I could use the air before the pump
* long dwell time - so a down flow with a wide pipe to reduce flow progress but a vortex may be a better option.
 
Hammy said:
some nice ponds posted :) is a pump/filter required ?
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A pond can be designed to minimise energy use, and use plants for filtering. You normally want the water moving, and you want something to remove nitrogen etc.

if you think - looking after the water and everything else looks after itself.

Probably want a pond, of which 1/3 volume is filter/vegetation. If you’re not keeping fish then you can simply reduce that - all depends on what you want from the pond.
 
Depends whether you want to keep fish in it as that adds a whole new dimension. A normal pond with plenty of oxygenating plants and perhaps a waterfall prevents stagnation and keeps the water sweet. I found it ok to add a small number of (small-ish) fish without worrying about filtration. If you don't over-crowd it then it's self-balancing. It took years to get my pond truely established where it required little maintenance other than trimming the plants. Even the fish didn't really need feeding because there was plenty of live food available in there. I only put a little food in for new fish that were not accustomed to foraging for themselves. I only ever kept max of 6 fish <4" and for the most part I never saw them. They would appear if I put a little extra food on top but they preferred whatever tasty bugs they were eating in deeper water :) Fish would hide under the water lilly leaves which also offered good protection from the sun. *Didn't stop the Heron spotting them though - I thought the overhanging stone edges would stop it but no, it stood right at the edge and managed to spear them anyway. Keeping large carp is a different story altogether and requires careful management because large fish place a big demand on the resources of a small pond. You would need to plan out a pond for carp with these considerations in mind.
 
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ChrisLX200 said:
Depends whether you want to keep fish in it as that adds a whole new dimension. A normal pond with plenty of oxygenating plants and perhaps a waterfall prevents stagnation and keeps the water sweet. I found it ok to add a small number of (small-ish) fish without worrying about filtration. If you don't over-crowd it then it's self-balancing. It took years to get my pond truely established where it required little maintenance other than trimming the plants. Even the fish didn't really need feeding because there was plenty of live food available in there. I only put a little food in for new fish that were not accustomed to foraging for themselves. I only ever kept max of 6 fish <4" and for the most part I never saw them. They would appear if I put a little extra food on top but they preferred whatever tasty bugs they were eating in deeper water :) Fish would hide under the water lilly leaves which also offered good protection from the sun. *Didn't stop the Heron spotting them though - I thought the overhanging stone edges would stop it but no, it stood right at the edge and managed to spear them anyway. Keeping large carp is a different story altogether and requires careful management because large fish place a big demand on the resources of a small pond. You would need to plan out a pond for carp with these considerations in mind.
Click to expand...
going to do a pond this year will be about 20ft by 20ft and 5 ish feet deep at the deepest part wanting to keep about 20 Koi so wanting to put some sort of pump into make a water fountain or similar
 
Hammy said:
going to do a pond this year will be about 20ft by 20ft and 5 ish feet deep at the deepest part wanting to keep about 20 Koi so wanting to put some sort of pump into make a water fountain or similar
Click to expand...

1 meter x 1 meter x 1 meter is 1000 litres so that's a 6x6x1.5 = 55,000 litres. Most ponds want 1x volume per hour to cycle through the filtration. The larger ponds can reduce this turn over rate a little.

This is a large pond. Koi basically create 4x the mess of goldfish. Most filters you will see off the shelf are for 5-7,000 litre ponds and spec'd for goldfish. You can forget "easy" filters. A 20,000 lph pump runs at 300Wh. So you can see this starts getting expensive. That flow rate needs bigger things - like rotational drum filters, and then you need to treat the nitrogen.

Now an option is to design a pond that uses airlifts without a water pump. Each 4" pipe airlift ~180cm long will get about 18-20,000lph of water with 20lpm of air. So I run my entire pond with a pair of airlifts, plus bio and bottom drain air all on a 80lpm air pump - that means my entire pond runs on air, and that pump is only 58Wh.
I have a 80W UV and pump but that only works part time on a separate loop - this removes green water and helps reduce parasites etc.

To get clear water:
* Use an RDF to remove physical waste - it will need water and a drain this will remove 50-70+ micron mess
* Use a bio + plants to treat the invisible waste in the water, this will need quite some area to work effectively 1/3 of the pond but the koi will make a mess of plants if they're in the plants are in the pond. Instead you can make a 'river' where the water flows along (say at the back of the pond) where the water flows along and the plants then remove nitrogen.
* Use a UVC (UV clarifier) in a loop to kill off the free floating green algae
* Use a protein skimmer to remove dissolved organics smaller than the RDF can take out.

55K liters is a large volume of water. I started with a 1200 litre pond, then built a 14,000 litre pond.
 
An example a 55K RDF new will cost 3.6K and that’s without the pipework.. so you will need to plan the pond. It will have 4-5 bottom drains, probably two wall skimmers etc.
 
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