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| Ok, I'm near Phoenix, AZ, and I bought a house a couple of years ago that had an unfinished pond in the front yard. It's made out of concrete blocks and poured concrete. The size is a bit hard to estimate, It is about 24 inches deep maybe a little more in the middle and it's an odd shape, maybe 8 feet accross both ways (I will get more accurate measurements later). We're having a huge storm here in water always pools up in my backyard and I have to pump it out so it won't come insides, so this time I pumped it all into the pond. Now I'm thinking about what I can do to treat this water and clean it up good enough to put some fish in it.
There was a "waterfall" feature before, but I got rid of it because it was ugly as sin. The neighbors kept complaining that it looks like a tomb, so I'm thinking of just putting some kind of a water fountain feature in the middle of it to aerate the water and putting koi or other fish in there to control mosquitoes. Any ideas about how I could clean this murky water? Obviously it would have better if I had captured rainwater off the house and used it, but even that is probably pretty nasty because of the pigeons on the roof. Even if I just want to keep the water for later to use for watering the garden, I need to sanitize it because we do have dogs. |
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| Your pond sounds about 1500-2000 gallons. One way to figure out true capacity is measure how long your tap+ hose takes to fill a 3 or 5 gallon bucket and then how long it takes to fill the pond. You should be able to do the math. Best thing to do is pump out this water, clean the remaining silt out, set up a submersible pump in a prefilter going to a skippy or other biofilter that feeds a waterfall. Refill, get filter going, buy some waterlilies and some other plants good for your climate, pot them and place into pond. After about a week, put in some cheap goldfish. If after a year, you have kept them alive and have discovered if local predators (birds, coons, ...) don't snack on them, you can go for more expensive goldfish. Your pond is too small for koi. You can get a submersible pump that also has a fountain attachment or a separate fountain pump. My pond (1500 gallons) is pretty low maintenance and is set up the way I describe above with goldfish and rosy reds, waterlilies, and several types of marginals + parrot's feather. |
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- Posted by sleeplessinftwayne z4-5 IND (My Page) on Sat, Jan 23, 10 at 17:32
| The reason you need to change the water is because the water collected from the yard will have such things as herbicides and fertilizer in it. Not good. |
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