Filtration
I’ve been in the pond hobby for just over 25 years and in the beginning had great difficulty in keeping my pond water clear. I used to use the upflow bio-filters which we made ourselves and found that they worked quite well, at least for a little while. After a while I found that my water would start to turn green again and I couldn’t understand why. So, I was told to drain the filter and remove the lava rock to see what was going on. What I found was that about 1/3 of the lava rock was covered in sludge, at the bottom of the filter. Backwashing did nothing to get rid of this sludge, therefore, the good bacteria would continue to die as the sludge crept higher and higher in the filter.
I was then showed how to make a downflow bio-filter. The mechanical part of this filter was at the top and I use a couple of layers of window screening to trap debrus from the bottom of the pond. The water then flows down the filter, through (plastic scrubbies) and up a pipe bringing the water back to the top of the filter and out to the pond. Now, my filtering medium (plastic scrubbies) never gets dirty. They are always clean and loaded with good bacteria which removes ammonia and nitrites from the water. My water is always crystal clear and free of hair algae. I can clean the window screening every few days or whenever it needs it and this doesn’t hurt the good bacteria in the filter.
Barley straw, chemicals, u.v. lights, etc., are quick fixes but don’t address the real problem which is usually an unbalanced pond. We used to have 14 ponds in our yard where we bred and imported quality Koi and Goldfish and without this bio-filter, we would never have been able to keep them all alive and healthy.
I’ve been where many of you people have been. I had a green pond for at least 10 years. I had tried anything available to me to clear my pond water. I was told that my pond water would never clear because I didn’t have 60% plant coverage but when your dealing with Koi, all of you know what damage they can do to plants and water conditions, so we ended up removing all our plants and built a bigger bio-filter and ended up with just a Koi pond and our water was always clear. Our lilies and other plants were in a pond next to our big pond.
I know that I certainly have gone on about filtration but it’s just that I’m so passionate about the subject because of my difficulty trying to clear our pond and want to help anyone who is having the same trouble.
Yours Koily, Lorraine
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Category: Worldwide Koi Club
