I would like to know what the formula of salt per 100 gallons of water is. I have some stressed fish...

Here you go--

Formula for Salt in Koi Ponds:

1.0 lb salt/100 gal = 1.25 ppt (parts per thousand)
1.5 lb/100 gal = 1.88 ppt
2.0 lb/100 gal = 2.5 ppt
2.5 lb/100 gal = 3.125 ppt

For amount of salt to add to get to a desired concentration in ppt:

Lb salt to add = (total gallonage of your system/120) multiplied by (desired salt conc. in ppt - current salt concentration in ppt)

For example:

Pond system volume: 4400 gal
Desired salt concentration: 1.5 lbs/100 gal = 1.88 ppt
Current salt concentration = 0.6 ppt

Lbs salt needed = (4400/120) x (1.88 - 0.6)

= 36.666 x 1.28 = 46.99 lbs salt

Remember to add gradually, and preferably not into your filter inlet feed. Waterfall or stream is best.

Please note that salt as a constant additive probably confers no provable benefit to the health of a fresh-water fish. It is useful in early spring to prevent methemoglobinemia ("brown blood disease") caused by accumulation of nitrite as the populations of bioconverting bacteria emerge at their own characteristic rates from dormancy. 1.5 lbs per 100 gallons (1.88 ppm) is probably enough. Wash the levels back down towards zero with water changes as your water warms up and your bioconversion fully kicks in.

Note that the above formula can be manipulated to give you a fairly accurate figure for pond volume if you know how much salt you added and have salt concentration figures for before and after the addition.

Bob

I am thinking of digging a farm pond on my property and putting Koi in it. The pond would be for our enjoyment but also to possibly raise Koi for resale. Also, could I put other fish (Cat, Bass, or panfish) in the pond. Would the Koi co-habit with these fish?

Well. Ambitious

As far as farm ponds are concerned, I can tell you that koi, being carp, will survive if the pond is big enough and deep enough and has decent aeration, but they will be subject to predation from all sides, and of all the carp subspecies, koi are least able to survive the challenges of living in the wild.

First, they are an entirely inbred and man-made creature. Their ability to withstand parasitic and stress-related diseases is impaired. Their bright colors attract the eye, not only ours, but also the eyes of kingfishers, herons, sandhill cranes, ospreys, bald eagles, cattle egrets, raccoons and 'possums (though the last tend to be too dam' dumb to do anything with the information!). Koi are naturally curious and will tend to swim towards anything new in the water, and as such, become "lunch" very easily. It's a lot like introducing your prize hunting dog into a pack of wolves' territory with no place to hide.

Second, while koi are nonaggressive, they are very good at reproducing. Any of your critters that survive the challenges of predation (which means that you'll select for those fish most like their ancestors, grey carp) will stay deep and you'll never see them. While they are down there, they will reproduce, and within a very few years, will overpopulate the pond. What tends to follow this is a sudden die-off and all the fun of disposing of a couple of tons of dead fish. It should also be noted that koi are notoriously inefficient at food processing. They eat nonstop and produce huge quantities of waste products. A look at most successful hobbyist ponds will demonstrate that the major investment of the hobbyist was the biofiltration system.

Fish for resale is even more problematic. Water gardeners come in a wide spread of enthusiasms. Those that look for fish to admire in our ponds and take to koi shows tend to be -er- picky about where the fish come from, and the fanciest want to know the bloodlines.

Carp will cohabit with most fish, but you need to remember that panfish tend to be predators. Especially bass, who will look upon the small to medium koi as lunch, and bluegills, who consider fish fry of all types as delicious. If you are buying show quality koi for breeding (at $5000 to$40,000 per fish for the best bloodlines {no I am not kidding!}) a farm pond is not a good place to put them.

Speaking of farm ponds...

I'm an ex-farm boy myself (Starke Co., IN) and if I'm thinking what you are thinking, what you plan is your basic hole in the ground at the lowest point on your property. I can not begin to tell you what a bad environment that will be. It will be big enough to attract ducks and geese, and while they are pretty, they carry countless parasites and communicable diseases from elsewhere. A serious koi keeper is ultra-paranoid when it comes to these problems, and flat will not purchase fish from a random farm pond. Most farm ponds, unless they are spring-fed, tend to be stagnant, and murky. No oxygen gets to the bottom and anaerobic conditions prevail. Fish die quickly in these conditions if the water is deep. If it's too shallow, temperature changes will cause unacceptable stresses. Farm ponds tend to slope gradually from shallow to deep, and this form of construction encourages wading predators as mentioned above.

The lowest point on the property will be a target for runoff, too. Any fertilizer, weed killer, insecticide or other pollutant in or on the surrounding soil will end up in the pond. If it rains heavily and floods, your fish are gone.

Don't expect your farm pond to be crystal clear, either. It'll have a mud bottom and it'll look like mud, at least the parts of it not filled with microscopic and hair algae. You'll be tempted to use chemicals to control this. Also a bad idea. Once the chemicals are in they never come out. Remember too that stagnant water is perfect for raising mosquitoes.

Please do not misunderstand. I'm not "anti-farm pond". They serve a specific purpose in the overall ecology of a farming system. If large enough and deep enough, many panfish will survive happily there if they are adapted to the conditions and water management is competent. Farm ponds are not a place for show-quality koi, though, and carp of any description can put a significant strain on an otherwise healthy and balanced pond ecology.

Your best bet for ongoing education would be to find a reasonably local koi hobbyist society or a water gardening club, join it, and start learning about the animals and the challenges. A visit to a working koi fishery (Kloubec Fisheries in Amana, IA is fairly close to you and has a nice website) might also help.

Hope this helps.

Bob

Hi Dr. Bob.

I just had my first pH crash and after researching everything possible to fix and recover from it I now have a BRAIN OVERLOAD. Carolyn from Microbe-Lift sent me your web link to get some answers from a pro (thus-YOU).

I’m in Charlotte NC and 9 yrs ago I built a 4000 gal Koi pond and have 9 Koi (18-24’’) left ( born in the pond, hand feed and named), I also have 15 goldfish. I have a 200 gal media filter box and a 200 gal bio filter box both with up flow water that goes back to the pond. I also have a waterfall, UV light, skimmer and everything is running on two 5000 gph pumps with plenty of circulation. I faithfully clean out mechanical filter and do a 10-15% water change ever week using ML/Xtreme for conditioner (after pH crash I will also continue them through the winter months). I have never had a problem with the pond until pH crashed (a ton of rain) 2 weeks ago and lost 4 of my biggest Kio. With the cold weather and holidays I’m embarrassed to say the pond gets neglected for a couple months in winter. Now I need some help to recover from this.

I’ve been using baking soda to bring pH and KH levels up, I also put 50 Lbs of crushed oyster shells in filter box to help maintain levels. I also put 30 lbs of crushed coral in filter box to help with pH, not sure if 30lbs is enough to do anything to pH levels. With the baking soda additions came ammonia spikes so I started doing water changes, 10-15% a day for 4 days. Went from 3.0 to 0.50 but know I’m noticing that nitrate levels that were 0 are also going up.

Tap water test, pH/6.8 or a little lower, KH/40, GH/25.

Pond water test today, pH/7.2, KH/80-100, GH/75, Nitrite/0, Nitrate/20, and Ammonia/0.50

These are the only products I’ve ever used in my pond. Microbe lift/Xtreme for water conditioner and chloramines (tap water is treated with chloramines), ML/PL to help keep healthy pond and bio filter, ML/liquid barley (not with peat), and baking soda.

I just started using crushed oyster shells and by Carolyn’s suggestion and ML/Nite-out ll for ammonia and nitrite oxidation. The water temp on Friday was 48 but we are suppose to be in the upper to lower 20’s at night for the next 10 days (thank goodness days are much warmer) so I’m not sure how well ML/nite-out ll is going to work because it said to start using at 55. I also order Koizyme to help out with aeromonas alley which I’m sure will be a problem in spring after having a pH crash and I’m sure the crash has killed my filters.

So my question is how do I fix it? This is what I THINK I know from all the brain overload research. Ammonia levels are not as toxic in cold water but I’m concerned about when the weather warms up and bio filter starting over (with big fish in pond). How do I keep ammonia levels down and nitrite and nitrate levels going up without water changes every day? Is there a product you would recommend or will the ML/nite-out ll work? I also picked up a gal of kordon AmQuel plus at petsmart it’s an ammonia detoxifier, I haven’t used it yet because I’m not sure. I also read that salt will help, 1lb for 100 gals for me that’s 40 lbs. When should I put it in pond and for how long, is this the right amount and what kind of salt can I use. I’ve read that it can be salt for water softeners or rock salt (there is no where to get that much pond salt around here and price is very high for pond salt online). I’m also concerned about pH, KH and GH levels being low out of tap, how often can I use baking soda (adding 1/3 cup per 1000 gals). I also know that using baking soda raises the pH and higher pH leads to ammonia spikes. But I need the baking soda to raise the KH to keep the pH from falling to low. I just put in 50lbs of crushed oyster shells and I know they take a while to stabilize is 50lbs ok and how often should I replace them? GH is also low and from what I’ve read it works better a little higher for Koi, what should I use to raise it if anything.

I’m sure I forgot to ask something and I’m so sorry about the BOOK, but as they say “Knowledge is Power” and I could use a little of that power right know. Thank you
Deb

Okay, I'll try to take these in order.

1) How much drop in pH is a "crash"? You have to remember that pH is the reverse log of the hydrogen ion concentration. That means that a change of 1.0 in the pH reflects a tenfold change in the [H+]. A change of 2.0 is 100-fold! Usual water pH out of the tap around here is between 7.5 to 8.5, depending on the water source. Your pH of 6.2 reflected a sudden increase in acidity of nearly 100-fold. In fact, any sudden change in pH more than 0.1 is enough to impact your fish and filter. The reason for the crash was your KH. (Stands for "Karbonate" hardness {those sneaky Germans!}) We in the frozen North call it "alkalinity", also a misnomer. It is your pond's ability to resist changes in pH and should NEVER drop below 80-90ppm. Water out of the tap around here runs about 120ppm.

2) Plaster of Paris. Get it from the craft store. It'll be purer calcium salts. The Dap stuff is strengthened to handle patching jobs. The craft stuff isn't. You use as many of the pucks as you need to keep your alkalinity up above 100.

3) Solar salt. Look at the bag. If it says "99.mumblemumble % pure solar salt, it's good. Avoid pelletized or treated products. They are not fish friendly. For guidance in their use, go to the MPKS website for the salt formulae and the article I mentioned. Your fish can handle up to 3 lbs/100 gallons for several weeks without too much stress, and 1.5 lbs /100 gallons almost indefinitely. Your beautiful plants will die at the higher salt levels (3.8ppt) but can handle the lower concentrations (1.88ppt). Do not use salt unless you see the nitrite begin to spike up. It will start to rise as the ammonia begins to fall. Your pond's biofiltration will begin to rev up as your water temp approaches 50 F. At 55 F you'll see the ammonia begin to drop and the nitrite begin to rise. DO NOT FEED THE FISH! Salt up gradually over two or three days and watch the nitrites. As they begin to drop, you can start to wash down the salt levels with water changes. Do not use salt without a reliable way of testing for it. Do not use ANY formaldehyde-containing anti-parasitics in cold water or water with salt in it.

4) Never NEVER throw away instruction sheets!

Bob

Bob,

Thank you so much for responding so quickly, you help is greatly appreciated!

First I want to say that I’m not exactly sure it was a pH crash because I’m not sure what the definition of a pH crash is. After the first 2 fish died and I wrote to Carolyn from Microbe-Lift because I thought it was some kind of illness. As she asked I went out to test the pond and that is when she suggested a pH crash.

When I tested the pH was very close to 6.2 and the KH/40, does that mean pH crash. And at what pH number does it completely kill off my filter?

I went to Lowes today to look at plaster of Paris; they have Dap in a 25lb box for $16. The ingredients are calcium sulfate, hemihydrate, calcium carbonate & crystalline silica is this ok to use or is there something different at the craft stores? You said I can throw a few in pond and they will dissolve in a week or two, when they dissolve do I throw in a few more and continue to do that each time they dissolve or only when KH gets low? Do they make pond look mucky after all it is a type of drywall mud. This idea sure sounds a lot easier than the heavy 50lbs of crushed oyster shells that’s taking up room in my filter box.

Home Depot didn’t have the solar salt but Wal-Mart did, it’s a 40lb blue bag of Morton solar salt water softening crystals (is this the one to use). I’m not sure when to start using the salt, I have read that salt in very cold water will make the water feel colder for fish, thus the reason they use it to make ice cream. (Not sure how much truth) With that said it is going to be very cold here for at least 10 days, at what temp of the pond water should I start using the salt to keep my fish safe from nitrites. In your opinion what is the best ppt amount of salt to use and how many days should I keep it at that level without harming fish before I start to reduce it with water changes. Sorry about having so many questions about salt but, I’ve never used it before and 50 plus lbs of salt seams like a lot (scares me just a little).

In the meantime I’m testing the water every day for pH, KH and ammonia. I have the API ammonia test kit and I’m almost positive that I read on the instructions sheet (before I threw it away) that it was salicylate. If Nitrite, Nitrate or ammonia levels go up I am ready for water changes. One end of the drain hose is connected to the bottom of the filter box and the other end is out at the street, just open the valve and out with the old and in with the new.

And YOUR RIGHT, my goal period… is to never let this happen again! I’ve cried like a baby over losing my pets, they are to me like most people dogs are to them.

Thank you so much for your help,

Deb

Hi Deb!

Isn't this a great hobby? Aren't we having fun?

I think sensory overload is a mild term for what you have, so let's try to simplify things. First, I think if you back off and look at the whole problem, it might get a little easier to cope with.

pH crashes happen when the natural nitrifying action of your filter bacteria use up the carbonates dissolved in your water. As the buffering capacity of your pond decreases, the hydrogen ion (acid) liberated by the nitrifying process builds up, your pH drops (usually suddenly) and everything dies.

From that point, you have two necessary strategies:

1) Short-term, you need to restore as much buffer as you can as quickly as you can. You've already done this with the baking soda, and there's no real limit on how much you can use. While it will increase your dissolved solids load, it also acts a little like salt, but we'll talk about that later. Bicarb is not, by itself, a base. It's a buffer. It will raise the pH in the pond by soaking up the free hydrogen, but it won't push you so far into alkalinity so as to imperil your fish. Remember that for ammonia, low pH is protective. It ionizes the ammonia, rendering it less toxic. You run into trouble as the pH rises and the deionized ammonia levels increase. Your short-term solutions to this are water changes (done) and products like Amquel. The problem with Amquel and its cousins (ChlorAm-X and ProAm-X) is that they are pricey (especially when bought in a pet store!) and they also interfere with standard (Nessler reagent) ammonia test kits. They do a great job of taking the ammonia out and even deal with chlorine and chloramine, but you'll need a salicylate-method ammonia test kit to follow your ammonia levels until you can clear the Amquel out over time with water changes. To keep costs down, you can get ten-pound buckets of the powdered product as well as the LaMotte salicylate test kits from Aquatic Ecosystems (now Pentair Aquatics) in Apopka, FL. Your important measurements for the short term will be pH (7.2-7.5) , Ammonia (0) and alkalinity (KH- around 120 ppm). Forget GH, it has no value here.

2) You are correct in assuming that your filters are quite dead. You now have "new pond syndrome" all over again. You WILL HAVE a nitrite spike soon as your biofilters come back. Remember that the bacterial populations that do the ammonia-nitrite conversion show up a couple weeks before the nirtite-nitrate bugs. Nitrite is ferociously toxic, and your mid-range goal is to control this. First, feed sparingly, if at all. Second, water changes are your friend. Third, salt helps. A lot. This is about the only ponding scenario where salt has any value. Concentrations of 1.88ppt (1.5 lbs per 100 gal) to 3.8 ppt salt will keep the nitrite from binding to the piscine hemoglobin in your fish's blood and giving them the fishy equivalent of carbon monoxide poisoning in humans. As your bacterial populations restore themselves, you can wash the salt levels down with water changes. While you are ordering your ProAm-X, get a salt meter from Pentair, too. They cost around $40 and are a really good thing to have.

3) Salt is CHEAP! You just have to know what to buy. The "Solar Salt" in the 50 pound blue plastic bags at Home Despot or Menard's is just fine. "Pond salt" from the pet store is a ripoff. My article on Salt ("Oh Noes-More Salts") is up on the MPKS website.

4) Most "bacterial boosters" are useless. Either they have very little in the way of active biofiltration bugs, or they have the wrong ones. My expert at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Alan LaPointe, says that the only additive worth using is a custom product that is sent fresh to big aquariums when they are preparing new aquatic habitats. The stuff he uses has a shelf life of about 2 days, but it works.The company (Fritz Products) started marketing a modified version of this product with a longer shelf-life last year. It's called Turbo Start 700 and you can get it from www.proaquatics .com (800-955-1323, ext 158.) It is still pricey and needs to be kept refrigerated and used quickly, but it works. Reliably.

5) Long-term, your goal is to NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN! Given your location, you have a year-round ponding season, and even though you consider 40 F to be the deep freeze, your pond and your fish keep right on churning out the [H+] and the ammonia. For you, there is no time in the year when you can relax your vigilance on your water quality. The coral and the oyster shell are very slow releasers of calcium salts and do not work well in small-scale environments (i.e.: backyard ponds). A much more efficient solution to Alkalinity maintenance (besides frequent, year-round water testing) is the "pond puck". Go to your favorite craft store and get a big ol' box of Plaster of Paris. Mix up a batch of it and pour some into a bunch of empty margarine tubs. If this is just too low-class for you, you can use fancy Jell-O molds or whatever. When they have solidified, hide a few in your falls, skimmer and anywhere else the water moves. They'll dissolve over a week or two and maintain your alkalinity nicely. Cheap, too!

Ponding and koi keeping is one of the most challenging and absorbing hobbies in the Universe. It forces you to learn new things on a constant basis and rewards you with summers of tranquility and "good ch'i" (for all you fung shui fanatics out there). As a fellow prisoner of the Three Laws, I salute you!

Happier ponding!

Bob

Hi Dr. Bob.

Putting in a koi pond in Champaign, Il, zone 5/more recently 6. First time. 10,000 gallons.

Would like to include gravity fed (from bottom drain) mechanical (settling tank)/biological filtration. Looking at Bioreactor 10000 from Lagunakoi.com (owner is Ben, have spoke with him several times, but he is in CA and knows little about our winters).

Could you help me with following questions:

• Are you familiar with any this type of set up in zone 5—gravity fed biological filtration? I am not having much luck finding a discussion of this concept for colder climates.
• It seems to me that such a system would need to be shut down in the winter (freezing, supercooling of water). What would happen to the biological filters during the winter following drainage of the filter—would all the bacteria die, and the system essentially have to start over from scratch? Would koi tolerate this each spring?
• Are you familiar with anyone using the Laguankoi.com Bioreactor 10000 in this zone? Do you know if there were problems? Any thoughts about similar issues with the Ultima system in this zone?

Thanks so much.
Jerry.

Hi Jerry!

For discussions of filtration in our lousy climate, please see Mike White's excellent articles on filtration on our website (www.mpks.org).

Any biological filter suffers in the cold, but there are some tricks you can employ that will allow you to extend your season, keep things running through the winter and eliminate the spring nitrite peak.

Nothing is going to protect you from "New Pond" syndrome. It takes time for your pond to build up a steady population of biological filter bacteria, and most of the bacteria "boosters" are useless. There is a relatively new product by Fritz-Zyme called Turbo-Start 700 which is a consumer version of the stuff used by large aquariums to "jump start" fish habitats for new displays. It cycles up in about 5 days. It has a very limited shelf life and must be used immediately after being ordered. It is also expensive. It is the only product available that actually works. Research it at www.proaquatics.com.

Any filtration system will work in our zone.These measures will help. A lot.

1) Avoid the use of submersible pumps. They are unreliable energy hogs and require more maintenance than they are worth. They cannot be used during the colder months if there is any risk of freezing or if there is a chance that they will be inaccessible during the winter. Better yet, never put ANYTHING requiring live current in your pond. This specifically includes trough heaters and copper "ionizers". (Why would anyone willingly put toxic metals into their ecosystem?)

2) Construct your pond so that the pipe runs (minimum 3" diameter) are all buried below the frost line and run to an enclosed filter and pump enclosure.( Home Despot prefab sheds work great for this.) Then insulate the shed and put a small electric radiator in the shed during the winter. All electricity, wiring and filters are INSIDE where they can be serviced out of the weather and kept dry.

3) Design your pond and its surroundings so that it can be covered during the late fall and winter months. Midwest Trading in St. Charles, IL sells a wonderful kit called the Versa-Quonset. It can be set up by two adults in about a day, covered with leaf netting in early fall to keep debris off the bottom and then covered with 6 mil greenhouse plastic for the winter months. Another small electric radiator at pondside under the cover will keep things warm enough to prevent freezing. Remember to install a door so you can enjoy those "Spring in January" moments. The plastic greenhouse not only keeps the wind chill off, it also protects the pond from snow-borne chemical pollutants and rapid temperature changes.

4) As you install the plumbing, remember to design in a maximum water level drain and a bypass from your filters to allow you to run filter output into the pond away from you falls. This will allow you to keep the pumps running year-round without the risk of ice dams and water diversion. An automatic float-actuated filler (with a charcoal filter in-line if you are filling from municipal water supply) is also useful.

5) Strongly consider building UP. An 18-inch above-grade berm surrounded and enclosed with landscape stone makes a beautiful scenic statement and provides protection from runoff from surrounding lawns (and lawsuits from folks who "just fell in"). It will also buy you an extra two or three thousand gallons on the same footprint. It also brings you closer to the fish, giving you places to sit on the verge as you admire your gin-clear water.

6) NEVER believe the claims made by filter manufacturers. Plan on installing at least twice as much filtration as your gallonage demands in the filter literature. More than that if you can. Keep your bottom drain and skimmer systems separate, with dedicated pumps and filtration for each. That way, if one system goes down for any reason, you still have a system up and running while you do repairs. Remember that your pumps, pipes and filters must be able to expose every molecule of water to your filters at least once an hour. The best defense against algae blooms is to deny the algae nutrient. Algae live on sunlight, CO2 and ammonia (NOT nitrates). The best preventer of "green water" is superb filtration. Resist the temptation to treat every problem you have by dumping in another chemical. Once in, it's in there forever until you can dilute it down with many, many water changes. If you run duplicate filters on the same system, hook them up in parallel, not in series. You'll reduce resistance to flow and expose untreated water to all the filters, not just the first in line.

7) Install (or build your own) protein extractor. You can buy these things for $$$$$$$, but there are lots of nifty designs available online, build-able from standard PVC plumbing components. This will eliminate the foam that builds up from natural fish metabolism and will also get rid of that brown discoloration from plant materials that fall in and decay. Your water quality will be immensely improved as well.

8) NO ROCKS ON THE BOTTOM! Bad bacteria and parasites grow in the sludge that inevitably collects, and they add nothing to the filtration.

9) 10,000 gallons? Bottom drains, boss.

10) Don't forget a UV system. It'll help with the floating algae.

11) A backyard pond absolutely requires constant filtration and circulation, or everything dies. An absolutely reliable source of electricity is essential, and every city in the world has power failures. Get a generator system that automatically senses a power loss and starts up automatically. Get one that runs off of your natural gas or propane supply. Really.

If you drain your filters dry, your bacteria are dead. If you just stop the pumps without draining, you run the risk of pipe rupture when everything freezes (especially if you do not cover the pond or enclose the filters) and your beneficial nitrification bacteria are replaced by anaerobic organisms that produce hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas that will kill everything in the pond. Far better to cover and protect your pond and filters and run the system all winter.

Golly, you got me going! Sorry about the rant. It's hard to watch somebody start up in this hobby and risk making all the mistakes I made over the past 20 years without trying to help.

Bob

Hi, Bob,

On the Internet, I was reading about koi clay used as a product that eliminates string algae when the pumps are turned on. I never heard about this before! have you or any club members used it with success?

Montmorillonite, also marketed as Renew (tm) is a clay product which contains a variety of metallic salts that are like vitamin/mineral tablets for both koi and filter bacteria.

Insofar as it improves the efficiency of the bioconversion bacteria, it will cut back on the ammonia required as nutrient for hair algae and reduce its ability to grow. It is not a "cure-all" or an algaecide. The only way to safely eliminate hair algae is to filter your water thoroughly and eliminate all ammonia.

Everything else is either a scam or a plant poison that will pollute your pond with organics and chemicals. The fancy electronic devices currently available saturate your pond's water with ionized copper, which is toxic to fish. The magnets don't work. Upgrade your filtration. That does work.

Bob

Dear Dr. Bob:

My husband failed to read the instructions on the algae medicine and killed all of our fish within hours. We have some plants in the pond that do not seem to be affected. What do I do now? Should I drain the pond before getting new fish?

Absolutely.

The chemicals in the water will stay in the water and can't be eliminated without a 100% water change. Remember that you will need to dechlorinate the water as it goes in.

Make your husband read the help files on our website about algae and how to reduce it. PLEASE try to restrain the impulse to treat every "problem" by throwing a chemical into the water. Most pond problems have other, more fish-friendly, solutions.

Bob

Bob, still having a struggle with the algae,the long stringy green stuff.

i have a some floating plants in the pond, along with a couple in the pots that sit in the water. the algae seems to be growing on the milk crates that i use to hold the potted plants. the fish in the pond are gold fish, about 12-15, 750 gallons of water, and i keep pulling this algae out on a daily basis.

whats your thoughts on barley pellets, or barley straw to control the algae, the pond water itself is relatively clean and clear. i have never had a problem like this before.

steve d

Hi Steve,

Hair algae grows when three conditions are met:

1) Reasonably warm temps 2) Sunlight and 3) Nutrients. We can't do anything about 1 or 2.

Nutrient for algae is ammonia, produced by your fish.
Algae will grow as long as there is excess ammonia to support it. The short-term solution is to pull the excess algae out with a biff brush on a broom handle. Long-term, the best solution is to reduce the level of ammonia in the pond. This is achieved by :

• Reduced feeding. The more your fish eat, the more ammonia they produce.
• Fewer fish. Are you allowing 200-300 gallons of water for each fish? If not, you need to reduce your pond's population.
• Failing that, you need to seriously upgrade your filtration. Algae will not grow if all the ammonia is being removed by your biofilters.

I am not now and never have been impressed by the ability of barley straw or its extracts to do anything but cost money, stain the water brown and increase DOC (Dissolved Organic Compound) load. Algaecides are even worse. Good water quality and zero ammonia levels will solve your problem.

Bob

I read about you organization in the Daily Herald, pond walks. I have a small backyard pond 100 (+/-) gallons. This is our 3rd year.

My question is that my koi are very skittish, they won't come out to feed. We winter them over in a 90 gallon aquarium, in the house. They were beginning to come to my hand to nibble, then about 4 months ago they would run and hide when I came to feed them. I had 2 that always nibbled, and I want them to come to my hand.

So when we transferred them to the pond they hide and never come out. I know they eat, because the food is gone. What is my problem, and what do I do to help them become friendly to me and my hands???? We really like the koi, and are happy with the ones we buy from Petsmart. Oh yes, they are about 3 - 4 inches. Thank you very much - Libby

Altered behavior in all your fish suggests either predation or water quality issues. Small ponds are particularly vulnerable to backyard predators, likely raccoons in your case. Not much you can do there, I'm afraid, except dig a new pond with minimum four foot depth and nowhere for the raccoons to wade. Water spray devices such as the ScareCrow, are occasionally helpful. They are sprinklers triggered by IR sensors. When we tried one, it proved far more effective in nailing and annoying our teenage son. The raccoons merely snickered.

The thing that worries me the most is multiple koi in a very cramped environment with no mention of biofiltration or water testing. If you have none of the former and have not been doing the latter, you probably have significant water quality issues. I urge you to go to our website (wwww.mpks.org), engage our Google Search Engine on "filtration" and "water testing", and read everything you find there. Koi are *not* goldfish! They generate more ammonia per ounce of fish than almost any other species. If you have multiple fish of questionable health (most pet store koi are heavily infested with various parasites) in a crowded pond with no way of getting rid of their waste products, I'd expect them to be irritable. If you were living in a sewage farm, you'd be pretty cranky, too. Get a test kit if you do not have one. Test your water. correct the problems.

Remember that the recommended volume of a pond for koi less than 8 inches is 50 gallons water *per inch of fish*! I suspect that you are overstocked.

Bob

Hi,

I'm building a new pond in my back yard and I wondering if I can use limestone in and around my pond. I believe it is limestone. I got the white rock from creek beds here in Missouri. It is 3' 7" deep and it has a 20x20 pond liner. I was considering building up a little to make is a bit deeper and I want to make sure I can use the stone I have. I have had different opinions of this. some say not some say yes.
Thanks

Hi, Curtis,

I'd have a sample checked. Limestone dissolves (slowly, we grant you) and it will tend to release magnesium and carbonate salts into the water. The magnesium salts will add to your "hardness" which can sometimes affect fish color. The carbonates are a good thing and will stabilize your pH a little. As long as the rock is smooth and does not present edges that will damage your fish, you should be fine.

Bob

We have an established 3,000 koi pond in the country. The past couple of years, we have had a problem with keeping the water clear.

We are running 2 pumps and have more than sufficient water exchange/turnover.

We began hauling city water in 2008 and have found the pond to remain more clear. Our well water has a lot of iron and calcium that seems to murk up the water.

We do add a dechlorinator routinely when we add water. I have recently read that city water will kill our beneficial bacteria. Is this true?

Thanks.

Barb

Frank & Barb,

City water is pre-treated with chlorine and a chlorine/ammonia mix called chloramine. The whole purpose of these additives is to kill bacteria. All bacteria. Without treatment, it certainly will kill off your population of bioreactor bacteria. Additives such as Stress-X, ClorAm-X, Amquel and others remove the chlorine and chloramine, rendering the water safe for your fish and filters.

Well water contains large quantities of dissolved minerals, including calcium, iron, sulfate and phosphate salts. These react with oxygen and sunlight, precipitating out as a cloudy flocculate material that makes your pond water turbid. Municipal water in the Chicago area is pulled from Lake Michigan, which has a relatively low level of these minerals, and has been filtered aggressively before pumping by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation folks. It's a lot purer than what comes out of your well.

Well water run through a filter made of activated charcoal will stay clear and will not need to be treated with expensive dechlorinators. Municipal water, similarly filtered will also not need chemical treatment. Activated charcoal is cheap and easily available. You can make a filter out of a bucket. Look into it.

Bob

Hello

My property was sprayed by accident a week ago for gypsy moths with BTK and three days later the ecosystem in my pond died and now one of my fish is in critical condition and 8 more in serious condition.

I call the county about it and they said this was safe for my fish but said nothing about the ecco system that the fish live in. I seem to remember other people having problems after a spraying.

To add insult to injury I was sprayed again today. I have been adding bacteria to the pond now and adding fresh water also.

Anything else I can do to try and save this pond? The pond is (was) a established pond for 3 yrs. before this and many of my fish I've had for 6 yrs. in this pond and in another pond. I've also found 4 dead birds on my property also.

Thank-you

Cindy

Cindy,

When you are dealing with an induced toxin, water additions rarely work. Multiple large-volume water CHANGES (as much as 90% at a time) and repeated filter flushes with clean water are needed.

At that point, your pond has to be treated as a new pond, and your biofilter has to regenerate itself over several weeks to months. Whether bacterial supplements and additives help with this is controversial.

The manufacturers claim that their products are whiz-bang essential. Talking to the experts, like the guys who run water quality at the Shedd Aquarium, you learn that these products are largely useless.

There are such products available, but they are designed to jump-start large-volume facilities (in the MILLIONS of gallons), are shipped live with a shelf-life measured in hours, are custom-tailored for the critters that will live in it, and cost thousands of dollars per application.Not suitable for the backyard hobbyist.

The populations in backyard ponds arises from the source water and environment, which is why small ponds take so long to mature. Many water changes, sparse feeding and much patience.

Sorry.

Bob

• First, you impaired your filter's development with the chlorine. Maybe not much, but enough.

   

• Second, it is still early in what has been a cold spring. Your bioreactor has developed enough of an early bacterial population to convert ammonia to nitrite, but there has not been enough time to get the secondary nitrite to nitrate population up and active. Nitrite is pure poison.

   

• Third, stop feeding. Do more water changes, and get about 2.5 pounds per 100 gallons of salt into your pond gradually over the next few days. Do not resume feeding until your nitrites are undetectable.

I have about a 700 gallon pond that i put i this year. I have 3 Koi that are are approx. 8 to 9 inches and 4 that are approx. 5 to 6 inches I brought them inside this winter because i can't stand not to see them every day. I have 2 - 50 gallon tanks and separated the large ones from the smaller ones.They all are flourishing very well, always hungry and following me whereever I go.

But today I noticed the small ones laying or resting on the bottom alot and trying to hide under the plants in a very close group practically one top of one another. I was wondering if they were mature enough to spawn? Because they still want to eat and follow me around but not as much.

The tank temp is around 75 to 76 degrees. My bigger Koi that are in another is a liitle cooler which is down in the basement which I have a heater in and try to keep it around 71 to 75 I have seen them laying closer to the bottom, but as soon as they see me they come to the top. It almost looks to me that it could be a group spawing but I've never seen one before and I didn't know how old they had to be?

Thanks
Jen from Michigan

The behavior you are describing is not spawning behaviour. It sounds more like a response to poor water quality. You have a lot of fish in not very much water and are feeding them heavily. If you do not have an active biofilter on your vats, you probably have very high ammonia levels in your water by now and your fish are feeling it. Start by testing your water. High ammonia levels should be initially treated with a near-100% water change using a reliable dechlorinator like Stress-kote.

Any filtration you set up now will take four to six weeks to begin to kick in. Do it anyway and do daily 25% water changes until your ammonia levels zero out and stay there. Make sure you watch Nitrite levels as well. Nitrite is more toxic than ammonia and takes longer to clear. Cut way back on your feeding until your filters come on line. Remember to check pH and alkalinity as well.

Go to www.mpks.org and read everything you can find there about filtration and isolation tanks.

Hope this helps.

Bob

Hi Bob,

We have a 12X16X3 koi pond. Last year I kept a hole in the pond all winter but still lost all the koi. All the goldfish managed to survive though. This year we brought the fish into the basement and placed in a stock tank. We have an air stone and 1,000 gal filter running but have already lost 3 of the koi. We seemed to have the problem start when I did a 30% water exchange. I did use a declorinator. Any ideas as to what may be causing the fish to die? Thanks for your thoughts.

Are you water testing the stock tank? If your filter is new, and set up with fresh media, it probably wasn't performing any bioconversion at all. The only way to make sure you have an active system is to have the vat system up and running all summer with a small fish load. Your media should come from the filters in your pond. Starting up fresh with a load of fish who are still eating is a ticket to ammonia-flavored disaster. What probably did it for your critters was a pH shift as your fresh water hit the water in the tank. Mass die-offs in tank environments are almost always due to water quality issues.

Bob

Dr Passovoy:

Thank you for your prompt response. We are relatively new to ponding; our pond is just two years old this month. When we started our water was really cloudy and our local pond supply house told us that we needed to lower the pH before we added any chemical to clear the water. So, we bought a testing kit and kept it below 7.4 and the water for the most part stayed clear. For reference, I am using a Wardley Junior Test kit, this only goes up to 7.4 pH. At the moment my pond is above this level but I cannot exactly how high it is. I found the article "Who's on pHirst" very informative. It would seem I have been wasting my time and money.

I tested the source water and it is approximately 7.4, certainly by judging color it is much closer to 7.4 than the pond. Early this week it started to get very murky, almost tea colored. Can you recommend a method or product to use to clear it again? In the past we have used various products to clear it up. Also, I checked the aquaticeco.com site; I am considering purchasing their Aquacheck Pond Test Strips. Have you used these or can you recommend them or one of their other products?

Thanks again for your help,

Richard Ambrose

pH is not the problem. It is also not controllable under outdoor ponding conditions with additives. The chemicals sold you at the pet store are designed for aquaria. Outdoor ponding pH usually runs at whatever the source water is, and this depends on where it came from and what it filtered through. As long as it is stable and above 7.5, your pond inhabitants will tolerate it just fine. Stability is conferred by dissolved carbonate salts (measured as KH or alkalinity). Levels between 80 and 120 ppm are optimal.

The tan color is dissolved organic compounds and the only things that will fix that are water changes, a protein extractor, and preventing the accumulation of plant debris on the pond's bottom. The cloudiness is suspended solids, and better mechanical filtration will take care of that. If your source water is from wells, you may have dissolved iron, which turns tan and murky on exposure to UV (sunlight).

I'd recommend the LaMotte fresh water pondkeeper kit, and would add a chlorine/chloramine set, a thermometer, a nitrate set and a salt test meter to that. Remember to keep records.

Bob

We have a 3 year-old 3000 gal pond with plenty o' circulation. No amonnia, nitrate problems, but pH was high, at 9, last week, which I attributed to the heavy rains recently. We did our second 30% water changes of the season and saw the pH come down to 8. we don't have many show quality koi, but our prized 12" sanke(of course, the nicest, and only, one) lost a lot of color overnight. All colors faded considerably overnight several days after a 30% water change. Is the fading related to the pH levels, the water change, or something completely different? How do we maintain proper pH in such a large pond?

Read "Who's on pHirst?" in the articles section.

Bob

What are acceptable water testing levels for pH, ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, oxygen?

pH: Koi are pretty tolerant fish to steady state acid/base conditions. pH becomes a problem when it changes rapidly and as the water heats up in summer. Koi do best at 7.5 (neutral) but will tolerate 0.75 plus or minus this as long as it is what they are used to. High pH (alkaline) conditions makes ammonia more toxic. The tendency of some koi shows to freely bubble their vats blows off CO2 and raises pH. At that point, even minor increases in ammonia levels can cause big problems with the fish. More of a problem, especially in bare liner ponds with high fish loads, is loss of alkalinity.

Alkalinity is, very simply, the measure of the pond's ability to keep its pH stable as conditions change. It is measured in ppm and ideal is around 100 ppm with a range of around 40 ppm in either direction. It depends on the presence of salts of various metals, primarily carbonate salts, which interact with the acid produced by the fish and the activity of the bacteria in the pond and the biofilter. This interaction smooths out the peaks and valleys of alkalinity and acidity that are natural pond water mechanics, and substantially lessen the stress on the fish and filter.

Low levels of alkalinity can lead to a situation in the pond known as a "pH crash". In this situation, (usually found in the above-mentioned bare-liner ponds with high fish loads), alkalinity drops below the level needed to stabilize pH, and the continued bioactivity of the pond causes rapid increases of acidity (lowered pH), often to levels as low as 6.0 or less. At these pH levels, the bacterial population in the biofilter stops working and then dies, leaving the fish to go on producing ammonia. The only half-good thing about this situation is that at low pH, ammonia is ionized, and relatively non-toxic. The danger to your pond occurs when you correct the alkalinity and pH before you remove the ammonia. Under those conditions, the ammonia returns to the non-ionized state and kills your fish.

Amquel will take care of the ammonia, just make sure you allow enough time to disperse it completely through your system before adding sodium bicarbonate to restore your alkalinity. Remember to take water samples frequently, and monitor ammonia first (see below) with a salicylate-based kit, then pH and alkalinity as you treat. pH can then be corrected with plain old Arm and Hammer baking soda. 1 pound in 1000 gallons will increase alkalinity by 70 ppm. The pH will "autocorrect" at this point, usually to a level of around 8.0-8.5. If it happens slowly, it's usually well-tolerated.

Ammonia: Any persistent level of ammonia is bad, indicating too many fish, too little filter or not enough water. Ammonia spikes occur after rainstorms and during spawning, as well as early in the season when the fish wake up before the filter does. The more you feed (especially the high-protein growth foods) the more ammonia your fish will produce. Chemical treatments, especially formaldehyde and other disinfectants (Chlorine in tap water!) can kill off your bacterial population, crash your filter and leave you with ammonia galore and sick fish, as can natural loss of alkalinity (see above). Levels of .05 ppm are acceptable as long as they are recognized and dealt with, either by cutting down on feeding, lowering the population of critters or improving biofiltration. Sustained levels of 1.0 or above definitely indicate a real problem that needs a major fix. This is even more urgent if your pH and temperature are high. Your biofiltration setup's bacteria take ammonia to...

Nitrite: Also toxic, indeed more toxic than ammonia, regardless of pH. Even low levels (.05) are cause for alarm if sustained. This usually indicates overloading or a seriously sick filter. In Spring, nitrite spikes are a common problem because the bacteria that takes ammonia to nitrite grows much more quickly than the species that converts nitrite to nitrate. This causes an approximate two-week gap in your pond's ability to cope with your desire to feed all those hungry mouths poking out of the water. High nitrite levels in the pond cause "brown blood disease" in koi, very similar to carbon monoxide poisoning in mammals. The nitrite binds to fish hemoglobin and prevent it from loading oxygen, at which point the fish die. Salt will, to some degree, prevent this problem. (See the question about salt and the salt formula.)

Oxygen: Koi require levels of at least 7.0 PPM to remain comfortable. Cold water (38 degrees) can hold as much as 13 PPM As your pond warms up in the summer, the water can hold less. For this reason, most experienced ponders have at least one airstone running and many have installed venturis both to move the water and to inject air during the depths of the summer.

See also Who's on pHirst?

(Answer courtesy of Bob Passovoy)

I have heard about adding salt to my pond. What is the purpose and when should I do it? Also, how much do I add, what type of salt is used and is it harmful to my plants?

Salt is one of those topics that start fights at koi club meetings, conventions and shows. Once regarded as a general antiparisitic and stress-reliever, it is now felt that while it has some limited usefulness as a "shock treatment" for heavy parasite loads at high concentrations and very short time-frames (2.5 pounds per ten gallons, 30 to 40 seconds as a "dip") and as a specific precautionary pond treatment for nitrite-induced methemoglobinemia ("brown blood disease") in early spring when the filter bacteria have figured out the ammonia-to-nitrite part of nitrification but are still too stupid to get the cycle all the way out to nitrate. Concentrations of 1.5 lbs per 100 gallons (1.88 ppm) is generally sufficient for this task, and can be allowed to dilute back to source water levels with water changes as the water temperature rises and the biofiltration kicks in fully. Aside from that, salt is probably non-essential. I recently did an extensive search online, looking for the science behind our fascination with salt and found nothing in the scientific literature to support its use, except as noted above. The strongest support came from an endlessly repeated article written by a purveyor of pond services who, oddly, sells pond salt. Hmmmm.

In an isolation tank, salt can sometimes save a fish with a large ulcer or (rarely) dropsy by lessening the osmotic gradient between the fish and the water. Fresh-water fish must pump water out constantly, and a breach in its skin allow water in. Salt in this situation reduces the amount of energy the fish has to expend on this pump and improves the chance of healing. A dropsical fish ("pine-cone" appearance) is a fish that has totally lost the ability to regulate fluid balance. Salt sometimes helps.

Most of our members do not salt at all or only when they have problems with parasites or nitrite load. Salt will temporarily suppress some fish parasites in pond conditions but will not kill them. Pond plants will tolerate salt levels up to 1.5 lbs/100 gal water. For individual antiparasitic treatment, try "The Dip": brief immersion of your fish in a heavily aerated salt solution at a concentration of 2.5 lbs/10 gallons. (Take your fish out when he starts to tip over. This is a *major* stress!) Remember, do not use your salted water to fertilize your law

Bob

Hi Bob.

I plan to add 2-3 inch baby koi to my very large back yard pond. I live in Michigan north of Detroit and my pond just lost top ice last week (we had a very hard winter). Should I plant them now or wait a month? Not many predator fish but plenty of birds. But not much to hide in yet such as plants either?

Hi Tyson,

The issue is not cover or predators, it is temperature. You do NOT want to introduce young koi into conditions guaranteed to kill them outright. Right now, your water temps are as near as dammit to freezing and a fish transferred in from a 70 degree tank will develop thermal shock and die on the spot.

You'll want to wait until your pond temp is reliably and consistantly above 55 degrees and nighttime air temps are consistantantly and reliably above 45 degrees at their lowest. Water test before you transfer and do one or two fish at a time, bagging them in the warmer water and floating them on the colder pond for at least an hour. Do not feed for several days until they have had a chance to adjust to the colder conditions.

Bob

Hi, Bob,

I have some questions about the parasite you highlighted in the current newsletter.

1) Can you have the parasite in the water without the fish being affected?
2) Does water temperature make a difference - more common in the spring in cooler water or hot summer water?
3) Can humans be affected by it with what looks like bite marks on the skin if they are in the water for any length of time?

Great questions!

Parasites are always present in the water, either as larval forms or free-swimming adults. Their numbers are kept low by good husbandry, minimum organic residues, and superior water quality. Low fish population is also protective. Healthy fish are able to resist infestation. Crowded, sick fish in bad water are not. Sort of like the difference between a 24-year old Olympic athlete living in Aspen, CO and a 30-year chain-smoking heroin addict living in downtown Los Angeles.

Early spring is a trouble time. Water temps between 40-60 F are warm enough for many parasites to be active, but too cold for a koi immune system to be fully awake. Very hot weather does not bother parasites. It will stress fish and make them more susceptible to infestation.

Fish parasites do not affect humans. An immunosuppressed person (HIV, chemo, etc.) can be infected with water-borne bacteria.

Bob

I have been trying to find reviews on Aquascape's IonGen. Is the jury still out on this product or is there some reliable reviews of this.

I got a look at an IonGen at the MPKS koi show. The guy selling it knew next to nothing about how it works, but from what I could get from the AdBlurb and the device itself, what it does is slowly electrolize a bar of copper, distributing copper ions throughout the pond and killing off all the algae. The problem I have with this is that copper is TOXIC and there does not appear to be any regulation on the amount of copper zapped off into the water, or how much is required to kill algae and not every other living thing in the pond. There does not seem to be any distinction made between a pond containing 300 gallons and one containing 30,000 gallons.

I'm in a hobby dedicated to preserving the health of a collection of "living jewels". I get uneasy when someone offers to solve a minor problem (solvable with other, more fish-friendly actions) by putting a potential toxin into my pond with no way of measuring its concentration or ultimate effect.

No thanks, I'll just upgrade my filtration. Again.

Bob

Hi Dr. Bob,

First off, thanks for being available for questions! My husband and I have a 1500 gallon pond with a couple of dozen (maybe 3 dozen) small goldfish and koi. Some of the fish have reached upwards of 6-8", but most of them are about 3-4" long.

Recently we returned from a vacation to find ALL of our koi fish dead...about a dozen...but all of the goldfish seem to be fine. We have a pond pump and filter, so the fish received oxygen from a constant waterfall, and the filter was clean, so the pump was working. The pump is attached to our sprinkler system so it refills itself to stay at the same level all the time.

I'm baffled at the fact that just the koi are dead, but the goldfish are fine. Do you have any ideas? Are the koi more susceptible to dying? Could there be a "natural" explanation for this, or is there another "human" explanation (like we did something wrong...)

Other than the dead fish, the water is seemingly clear and clean. We have not sprayed poison in the yard or anything we can think of that could have contaminated the water. My children think it did NOT rain while we were gone, but they could be mistaken. We have had other koi disappear altogether in the past, but believe that to be a raccoon in the neighborhood. Could an animal kill the koi only but just leave them there?

Again, we're so confused, but want to avoid this in the future. Thanks again for your thoughts!

Small long-bodied goldfish tend to be well-nigh bomb-proof. Koi are more delicate. A complete die-off of the koi suggests a water quality issue. The fact that your filter was "clean" worries me a bit. Your fish load is fairly high for a small pond, and I'd expect there to be a fair amount of bacterial debris on the mat or filter media. Its absence suggests the absence of bacteria and hence the absence of effective bioconversion of ammonia to nitrate. Are you testing for ammonia and nitrite? What are your pH and alkalinity?

If those questions are not triggering a response in your mind, please go to www.mpks.org and read all the Q&As and articles on filtration and water testing.

The fact that your filter is hooked directly to your sprinklers is not reassuring, unless your sprinklers are fed by well water. A municipal water supply is heavily chlorinated, and the dissolved chlorine will terminally damage a koi's gills and your filter bacteria. Goldfish will also suffer, but seem to be more resistant to the damage. Passing the water through an activated charcoal filter prior to running it through your filter or into the pond will solve this problem.

Predators would not select the koi exclusively. Goldfish are just as tasty.

Bob

Dear Dr. Passovoy, I am so sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you would mind if I asked you some questions about my sick goldfish.

I have had this goldfish for about six years and first acquired it when I was a teenager, and I have been learning about proper goldfish care ever since. This goldfish is now quite large, about 16 inches, and it is housed alone in a 55 gallon tank.

It suffers from what appears to be Ick and some bacterial infections, fin rot and septicemia. I first tried to treat the Ich when it first appeared by adding aquarium salt to the water and then trying a couple of medicinal remedies, Rid Ich first and then Coppersafe. Neither of these were effective, and I did water changes after each course of treatment to remove them from the water.

Recently I started the fish on a course of antibiotics, Triple-Sulfa, which I had never used before. It was initially effective, but even now, before the end of the treatment, the red streaks on the fins and the small red blotches on the body have returned. I was wondering if there was something else I could do, or something I'm doing wrong. I have been doing frequent water changes and the water tests are always good for ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates.

Thank you very much for your help.

Dear Riva,

Your problem is mostly that you have been treating a protozooal infestation with antibiotics, which not only work only on bacteria, but also create resistant strains of bacteria and weaken your fish. In general, NONE of the so-called Ich "cures" available in pet store work. The other problem is that ich has a very complicated life cycle, involving a free-swimming phase, an embedded (feeding) phase, and two cystic (trophont ant tomont) phases. Only the free-swimming phase can be killed by water treatments. Treated food is an absolute waste of money, since it does not contain anything that will treat the infestation, and second, because your fish are already too sick to eat.

Salt will inhibit, but not kill the infestation, requiring a concentration of 0.3% (3 grams salt per liter of water) to do the job.

Formalin/Malachite green solution works well, but treatment (10 cc/100 gallons water) must be repeated every other day for a total of three applications and without salt in the water. The water must be vigorously aerated and circulated. This chemical will kill your filter bacteria. You may also need to repeat the treatment in 1 or 2 weeks, since the feeding phase can last as long as 30 days at lower water temperatures.

Bob

Help!! my Koi are dying!

We recently rebuilt my koi pond. My filtration system was only 1 1/2 months running but, Purchased (9) 15 inch koi put it in 1000 gallon quarantine tank for 2 weeks then I put them in the pond drain 10% of pond water once a week and add dechlor and maintain salt level at .3 feeding my koi with medicated food.

Did I over load my system? The problems I'm having now is the fins& tail and outer edge of the gills are are turning red 3 weeks later. I have been testing the water for Ammonia & PH the test show it's all fined but did not test the nitrites.

I decided to take 2 of my kois to the pond place 9 miles by my house she had tested the pond water she said was my nitrites was to high and kois are suffering from nitrites poisoning and fluke and told me to raise the salt level to .46 and purchased Trichloracide to treats the flukes

it's been 2 weeks but, my koi are still dying. Any advice/help so I don't repeat the same thing again

Husband comment is "very expensive fertilizer"

Nitrite toxicity is not reversible.

You can prevent it with salt added BEFORE the nitrite level rises, but most fish with "brown blood disease" succumb due to hypoxia before they have a chance to generate enough red cells to recover.

A new pond must be loaded SLOWLY, with daily complete water testing. Medicated food will not help, and the fluke treatment may be stressing them further.

Before you try this again, go to the website at www.mpks.org and read everything you can find there on fish health and water quality. Read ALL the Q & As.

I have a fantail goldfish about three inches in length that I purchased from the koi show last year. It was fine until several months ago when it began having problems staying upright.

Eventually it completely turned over and now does not swim upright at all. It has difficulty eating, and just lays upside down on the gravel of the tank. What is wrong with him and can I help him?

Thank You, Drusilla Flowers

HI Drusilla,

Bob copied me on this email. It is not uncommon for Ryukin and Fantail goldfish to develop this problem, which is the result of genetics on the swim bladder of the fish.

Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this. Provided the fish can eat, it can live several years with this condition. I have had fish live for 4 - 5 years swimming upside down.

Regards, Peter Ponzio

Dr Bob,

My Husband and I have a 28"-30" Tancho, he/she might be between 12-15 years old. Back in her day she had won a ribbon or two.

Her / his once almost perfect red circle is today almost completely gone. The circle disappearance gradually started to change, it seems in the last year, As we opened the pond up this year there was probably half of the pattern left, as of today it's almost completely gone.

I have been told by various people that it could be a water issue, we have never had any issues with the water. Maybe it's the food, we always used a very reputable brand, to that the guy / girl is just getting ....OLD!. We see no other color issues with any of the other koi in the pond.

Your thoughts please...

Sincerely Karin
Lombard IL
Long time reader, first time E-mailer

Hi Karin,

Two main possibilities. The first (and least likely) is a condition the Japanese call Hikkui. It is a genetic failing causing promising young fish to decolorize. They are working hard to eradicate it, mostly by not breeding fish with bloodlines where it exists. Your fish is too old for this.

As a matter of fact, that's most likely the problem. With the exception of the Asagi --where red develops late and tends to be durable -- in most koi varieties, especially the most "refined" (read inbred) GoSanke (Kohaku, Sanke and Showa) red is often unstable and fades or disappears as the fish ages. It is genetic, and it is nothing you did. The red tancho is gone for good. This seems to happen to tanchos more than any other pattern. Just naturally unstable, I guess.

Bob

Hello Dr Bob,

We just did a complete water change today. We emptied our pond and cleaned it with a power-washer and added tap water. The fish are at the top of the water, at the base of the waterfall. I think they are having a hard time breathing. What do I need to do? I've heard of adding salt to the water but I don't know what I need to measure and how, and what kind of salt to add and how much. We also have an aerator in the pond and I added a half cup of Melafix to the water (I shut off the UV light) .

We've had out pond for 6 years, and it's approx. 1500 gallons. We live in Homer Glen a suburb of Chicago. We have "Chicago water".

We are new to the Midwest Pond and Koi Society (We haven't joined yet, but I'm planning on it) We went to the pond tour in the south burbs and went to our first meeting this month.

Any help would be appreciated.

If you just refilled your pond with untreated tap water, you've just damaged your fish's gills. Total water changes are rarely necessary, and ANY water change must be done with DECHLORINATED water.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District treats all tap water with a hefty dose of short-acting chlorine and long-acting chloramine to kill off harmful microorganisms in the water and prevent waterborne disease. Unfortunately, these doses are much higher in summer, and any of this material will damage your fish's gills. It is the same as chlorine gas and our lungs. It is very likely that many of your fish will die of this, and there is no remedy. Melafix is unlikely to help much.

Water changes are best done in 10-30% increments, with the remaining water in the pond pre-treated with a reliable dechlorinator (Stress-X or similar) BEFORE the new water is added. It is also likely that the chlorine has killed off most of your biological filter as well.

Pressure washing is also not necessary. The algae that form on your liner are beneficial, providing a snack for your fish when you are not feeding them and also helping to absorb some of the ammonia that they produce.

Sorry,

Bob

Hello Dr Bob,

Started the winter with four 4" comets and two 3" fantails. Now left with 2 comets. Orange comet has white fungus or something on his head. Other fish is white so who knows. The dead fish showed no signs of fungus or growth.

Rectangular cement pond (7'x3'x3') painted with rubberized paint. Set up w/UV filtration, the filtered water enters pond thru PVC pipe. An old bird bath base sits upon a cinderblock and holds a copper bowl. A pump and hose bring H2O up thru the bowl to spill into the pond for Oxygenation.

Two plants over wintering in bottom (parrot plant and small lily). They are cut back with about 4 inches of stem floating. A few leaves (3 or 4) on the bottom but pond is protected from elements. Some bubbles notable on water surface.

pH reads 7.5 Have added 3 lbs of Kosher salt and a bacterial/algaecide OK for Fish. Water is down about 6" from the normal 32" depth. And the water is too cold to think of cleaning the intake filter - hasn't been cleaned since Sept/Oct.

We are in the Phila area. Are the fish a lost cause? Should I drain, clean and refill with water in the spring? The clamps on the hosing show some rust could this be a prob.

Sorry for the long winded explanation. Any help/advice is greatly appreciated. Fish and pond installed July '07.

Thank you in advance.
Sincerely, Pat

The culprit may well be the bacterial/algecide. Most of these chemicals are intended for use in warm water, and can harm the fish when it gets cold. Algaecides are not recommended in the winter months at all, and in the summer will increase your dissolved organics load and degrade your water quality.

You may be able to save your last two fish with frequent 15% water changes, using dechlorinated water.

As a rule, you should do your best to avoid using pond chemicals, especially additives that kill things, at all times. Goldfish are tough little critters and will thrive if the water quality is maintained. Look carefully at your filtration and improve it as much as you can.

Bob Passovoy

...might I also suggest that you reconsider your waterfall? Copper is toxic to fish.

Anne Passovoy

Hi Bob,

please can you tell me if i should change my koi fish food for winter or should i feed them wheat germ just before winter starts and then stop feeding them

As your water temperature drops below 60, you should be feeding less in quantity and less frequently. In general, as long as you are feeding with a food that is primarily protein and soluble oil (Kenzen is currently the best available) you do not need to change brands. At water temps below 50 degrees, stop feeding entirely and wait for spring.

Bob

Bob,

We have a 12 month old pond. 24 feet long 8 feet wide and approx 2 feet deep at one end going to 4 feet deep at the other holding approx 1500 gallons. We have a waterfall, pump and UV filter. The ponds get afternoon late afternoon and evening shade.

Approx 40 of the fish are about 6 inches long and the remaining 12 new ones are approx 3 - 4 inches long. Over the last 3 months (since the winter started) we have lost approximately 6 fish to ulcers in their sides and top of head. We were told it was because we left the pump on over the cold weather and therefore pushing cold water constantly to the bottom of the tank - this was stressing the fish. Since the warmer weather started we have treated the pump with an anti-bacterial treatment and also an anti-ulcer treatment. We have a lot of lilies so the fish do get shade from them but we have notices that during the past 3 weeks we have another 3 fish showing signs of ulcers. We feed some flake (Tetra flake) for the smaller fish and some pellets (also Tetra) for the larger fish. We also have a lot of blanket weed.

Do you have any suggestion as to what we can do or are doing wrong? We are getting very desperate now.

(Second answer)

Tom,
Sorry to hear about the problem you experienced. I will try to help.

Ammonia is produced primarily as a waste product by the fish and and secondly decay of organic material (un eaten food, dead fish, etc). Ammonia levels can become very high when overfeeding occurs, the fish eat all they can (like us at Thanksgiving) and all that is then turned into waste product. The ammonia is removed by beneficial bacteria that grows in the filter on the glass, rocks etc. This bacteria consumes the ammonia. If more ammonia is produced than this bacteria can eat you can reach toxic levels quite quickly.

The fish gasping at the top is an indication of poor water quality, typically lack of oxygen in the water. Hind sight is always 20/20, The best thing would have been to test ammonia and oxygen levels when the first signs of trouble occurred, you would then know what the issue you were dealing with. If both of these tests came back good or the oxygen was low I would then think it was possibly toxin introduced by the fumes was the problem.

Next time you are asked to house sit it is a good idea to ask the owner to bag up daily doses of food in zip lock bags. The number one cause of death to aquarium fish is probably over feeding but after the fact I could not definitely tell you it wasn't the chemical (no fish CSI). A pleco will eat anything he can get his mouth on but algae is his primary food source. I have one that will flip upside down to get blindly get at floating food.

Pete Adamovich
AKCA Certified Koi Health Advisor
MPKS Member

We bought this house with a small pond, approx. 6' x 3' x 28" deep, don't know gallons? Would like to keep our 3 goldfish alive thru Missouri winter in it, could keep in house if abs. ness., wonder if a water tank heater would work? Nights down into 30's now, seem to be doing alright, still have pump and waterfall going,-should we? Please help as our fish seem to love us and will swim against hand and let us pet when cleaning filter, etc. Any info appreciated.

Hey Jim!

You've got about 218 gallons there (LxWxDx7.48)and a cold winter will put about 8 inches of ice right across the top. If your goldies are comets, sarassas or shubunkins, that is, long-bodied "carnival-prize" types, they tend to be pretty tough, and will do just fine outside as long as you stop feeding them when the water temp gets down below 54 degrees, cover the pond with a greenhouse arrangement to keep the wind off and critturs out, and stick a $30 Home Depot electric radiator under the cover to keep the pond at least partially ice-free. Small water changes with dechlorinated water on a weekly basis are essential. Round-bodied or "fancy" goldfish are not as durable.

Bringing them inside will require a 100 gallon horse trough, a good air pump and airstone, and a box filter capable of holding a good portion of the active media from your outdoor pond's biofilter. While goldfish are not as demanding as koi, they will overwhelm most commonly available aquarium systems. You'll want to water test for ammonia, nitrite, pH and alkalinity on a regular basis, and don't forget those water changes!

Bob

I just purchased a weekend home that has a 11' x 17' x 16" deep (approx.) pond. Seems none of the average landscapers, nurseries, plumbers, etc.. can fully give me a solution to my situation: The pond is consistantly fed by a deep artisian well, constantly displacing the water & ecosystem. This makes any potential chemical treatment near impossible.

I would like to put koi in to help keep down algae, snails & small swimming "creatures".

The overflow runs off into a small wetland creek, connecting to a lake. The lake is naturally spring fed, and apparently the DNR want's this spring/well on-going. If I am unable to diffuse the water from this pond totally or partially, can Koi exist in summer water conditions that are about 58 degrees. I realize their digestive system slows down, but am thinking of the possibility of somewhat reversing their seasons - meaning: perhaps I can have them become partially dorman in the summer months (which would also work good for limited weekend supplemental feedings) & bring them into an adequate size aquarium in the house durring the winter & create the warmer, summer conditions for growth. Have you heard of this done before? And if so, with what kind of result?

The Koi I have access to at this time are approx. 9" long (including fins). I found your site looking for a solution to rid the pond of leeches. Will the Koi eat the leeches, or more likely would the leeches "eat" the Koi ? Lastly, could increasing a soluble, unsaturated fat product in their diet help them in these lower water conditions? If so, what would you recommend? (The books I have read do not recommend feeding dry food in lower water temps.) ?

Any info you can give me, would be very much appreciated. I have aways wanted a Koi pond, but do not know if this is the right opportunity.

Thanks in advance, Tracy

Water temps at 58 degrees are the absolute lower limit that koi can tolerate and still be able to eat and digest complex foods and operate their immune systems. At anything below 55 degrees, they just sorta shut down. In a natural pond, the koi will eat small bottom-dwelling critters, but don't expect them to do much with hair algae. They'll eat almost anything else first. They won't grow much and won't be able to spawn, either.

Trying to reverse their season leaves you with the problem of keeping up with their demands indoors during the winter. A nine-inch koi requires either 50 gallons of water per inch of fish, or mega-filtration (like a couple of *big* bioreactors) to keep up with their warm-water ammonia production.

You absolutely do not want to run the risk of introducing a foreign species into a natural ecosystem.

Leave this system alone, or talk to the DNR guys about native species.

Bob

Hi Dr Bob,

My boyfriend and I bought a house here in Columbus, Ohio and as a result we inherited an unkept pond. We're doing our best to educate ourselves on pond and koi care but despite surfing the internet and reading days worth of material from a dozen different sites, still I don't feel like I have complete answers to our questions. I'm hoping you may have a moment to lend some advice. I would be very appreciative of any assistance. I have two questions, one regarding over-wintering and one regarding filtration.

The facts:

• Oval pond with dimensions 10ft by 15ft. It is a little over 2.5ft deep at the deepest point, however this is not a uniform depth through out the pond.
• Pond was built approximately 20 years ago with an impressive waterfall that is not in use currently due to shifting of the rock shelf and subsequent leaking
• Instead we use 3 water features powered by submersible pumps to make do until we can get a plan together to fix the original waterfall.
• 1 central fountain unit (Lifeguard All in one system) 679GPH, UV filter, mechanical filter, bio filter
• 1 side fountain pump, 1000GPH, standard square mechanical filter
• 1 pump running up to the bottom shelf of the original waterfall using an external drum type filter with mechanical and bio filter material. Memory fails but I believe this pump is either 582GPH or 899GPH
• We have 12 koi and most are under a foot in length. The majority are approximately 5 " and 2 of the koi are about 12"

Question 1 Re: Over wintering

Most sources seem to prefer a pond depth of 4-5 ft for koi. If we took your suggestion of using the hoop house and heaters, would our depth of approx. 2.5' still be completely hopeless for wintering koi outdoors? If it is as I suspect, and we need to over winter indoors, what is a recommended gallons per koi ratio for wintering? Also, I assume we could use our central fountain unit in a stock tank and this would be helpful because it has the bio filter material which has been in the pond all summer?

Question 2 Re: Proper Pump and filtration

As you can imagine, our current system of aeration and filtration is a giant pain in the ass. There's 3 separate filters which I change daily and they are not easy to get to ( hence the classy wood planks). Plus I still feel like we need greater filtration. The fish seem content and healthy enough but the water is periodically cloudy and I have had to physically get into the pond twice this summer to net leaves and fish waste. Goodtimes!

Can you offer some advice on what to buy when we try to reinstate the original waterfall. I have no idea where to start. From what I've read, external pumps and filtration are the way to go. The water fall ( which originates from an approximately 2" diameter tube at the top) isn't particularly steep or high but I imagine that it still has to be somewhere near 5-6 ft above the pond water level. How do I know how to choose a strong enough pump and adequate filtration? Is this something that can be easily explained? I plan on reading the AKCA book on filters and prefilters regardless, but I would still really value your perspective if would care to give it.

Hi Larisa,

I've always felt that the folks who inherit ponds with no prior pond experience are often the ones that have the most difficulty getting themselves comfortable with the hobby. Those of us that became ponders the more natural way, that is by digging a series of ponds ourselves and re-creating history by making all the same mistakes that ponders before us had made, have an easier way to go, simply because we eventually arrive at a point where our ponds set what we feel is an acceptable level of inconvenience and effort. Folks who inherit ponds are just thrown directly into the.hobby and have to deal with the mistakes that the prior owner made, generally without any help from an operating manual or any help at all from the prior owners.

In answer to your questions, a weather cover over your current pond will go a long way towards protecting your fish, regardless of your depth. A small hoop house with some sort of heat source inside will keep things warm enough to keep your water from freezing. You need not move your fish anywhere. If it is still warm enough, some effort devoted to cleaning as much junk off the bottom as you possibly can would be a big help. I will be sending you an article that I wrote for our club's newsletter. Feel free to raid our website (www.mpks.org) for more information. There's a lot of good stuff there, especially in the help section.

Your second question is a little more difficult. I am a strong proponent of the bottom drain/external filter system, mostly because submersible pumps are trouble prone, inefficient and difficult to keep free of fouling. Just about any good high-capacity external filtration system works well if you have the space for it. Most of the "pet store variety" filters available are very limited in their capacity, largely because they do not allow for adequate flows. They are generally also made of very fragile and, by ponding standards, inadequate materials. Something as simple as a large box or tub filled with mat, brushes, or PVC tape will work as well or better than anything you can buy from your local Petco. Once again, our website has a lot of information about filtration, not only how you start, but also how you select pumps and filters that match well.

Your waterfall looks like it might be wonderful, once you get it repaired. You will, I'm afraid, have to completely dismantle it and replace the liner underneath it in order to fix the leak. Remember that your liners edges need to the high enough and wide enough around the expected waterflow to prevent water loss by splash.

I'm reasonably sure that there are water gardening and Koi clubs in the Columbus area. Joining one of them and availing yourself of the help available will solve a lot of your problems.

Welcome to the hobby, even though you've been flung into it headlong. Happy ponding.

Bob

I am currently digging a pond, a koi pond in Northern Ill.

My hole is currently 12ft by 7ft by 3.5 deep. The hole is situated on the south side of my house, just off my back deck.

I have read many different recommendations for the depth of koi ponds, but to no avail it seems there is no solid advice for pond depth that I can find. Is 3.5ft deep enough or does it need to be 5 ft, or do I need 14” below 4ft?? I want to be able to leave my fish in the pond in the winter with some assistance from me.

What depth should I dig my pond to? Thank you very much in advance.

Hi George!

Koi keepers will tell you that deeper is better, many recommending 12 to 14 feet for really big fish.

The depth and gallonage buys you the opportunity for your fish to grow and your water temps and stability will be better.

The downside is that you will need high-end pumps and bottom drains at that depth and good pumps and bottom drains at any depth more than 3 feet. Regular maintenance requires access to the bottom. 10 to 14 foot depth requires skill with SCUBA gear.

A nice compromise is 5.5 to 7 feet. You still need the bottom drain, but can service it with swim fins and a snorkle.

HI,
Thanks for the time to respond to me.

I am learning that a koi community exists and is much larger than I ever expected. As such I am learning you can have a varied degree of involvement in the community and with the pond itself.

Although I am a certified scuba diver, I think I will pass on the very deep and large ponds unless I win the lotto. After talking with 2 people down the road who have smaller backyard ponds that I do, I will dig to 4 feet and leave it. One guy has a 2.5 foot pond and he keeps it unfrozen. Not saying his fish are the happiest in the world, but they look and act healthy this spring.

I will be more involved than this guy with my pond, but will not be as involved as most of your members are involved. I wish I had the time, money and space to thoroughly enjoy the pond the way I want, but at this time in my life my kids demand more time and money than I all ready have. Thanks again for the time and good luck with all,
George

Go to 5 to 5.5 feet George. Honest, you will never regret it.

Think about building up above grade with architectural stone about 18 to 20 inches. It buys an extra 1000 gallons in the same footprint, brings the fish up to you so the interaction is better, and prevents runoff from your yard from poisoning your fish and filter.

About a foot of compacted dirt between the stone and the liner gives you the stability you'll need.

Bob

I did some 'engineering' with my neighbor and it looks as if maybe it can be done and maybe I will raise it. I'll use granite boulders instead of formed stones, I have access to a few farms in the area.

Will I be able to see my fish at 5 feet deep?? I'm thinking of running a probead filter with a 2 speed artesian pump with two 3 inch bottom drains, a uv clarifier and 2 induction jets.

Pond is under a tree, directly under a tree, lol.

The key to seeing your fish is a bare liner bottom, bottom drains hooked to an independent pump,(your skimmer should be run from its own pump to its own filter) and the best biofiltration you can engineer.

The main impediments to gin-clear water are floating (pea-soup) algae and dissolved organics.

You control the algae by using a good UV system inline after your biofilters and denying it nutrients by removing the ammonia your fish generate with excellent bioconversion.

Dissolved organics are reduced with water changes and eliminated with protein extractors.

Bob

I got rid of my swimming pool this year but I have a like new sand filter that I would like to use on our large back pond is there any problem with using a silica sand filter for ponds with fish in them, I will get new sand and clean out the filter real well before using it, if anyone knows how this would be a problem please let me know....... Thanks in advance

Hi Tom,

Your sand filter will foul instantaneously and require backflushing three times a day if used in a ponding situation. The sand works in a pool situation because everything living has been killed off by the chlorine and all the sand is doing is filtering out the particulates.

A pond is a living organism, relying on bacterial colonization of the filter media to provide bio-conversion of ammonia to non-toxic nitrates. The active, living biological system generates a lot of goo, and sand is just too fine to work. You could discard the silica and get an equivalent volume of polyethylene bead or Kaldenes media to replace it. The hardware is the same.

Bob

Thanks for the info do you think I could use lave rocks instead of the sand??

No. Lava rock, while inexpensive and relatively light, breaks down to sharp-edged volcanic sand very quickly. This stuff will abrade and destroy your valves.

Worse, all those lovely little holes fill up with goo very quickly as well, and you will end up with the surface area in your filter equivalent to a bin of tennis balls.

Stick with polyethylene bead, Kaldenes or Biofil. They are biologically inert, structurally stable, do not channel or foul, and backflush easily.

Bob

Hello, this might be long winded but here goes.

I have one koi. One of his eye has been clouded white. I suspect that he scratch his eye and why it's infected. The other koi don't have it and it's on his left eye only. What would be the best course of action? I read all sorts of things and I am not sure what to do. I read that I should get a isolation tank for this sort of thing and just pour meds and see if it works. I read that I should continue observation and change my water more frequently. If it gets worse or spread, then meds the whole tank up. Only thing is that I am concern what it'll do to the bacterial colonies in my filter and what the cause is in case I have to do all the koi.

Also, I know we are doing all the wrong things but my mom keeps on buying them. So I been reading up to actually take care of them. I been pleading for a pond and we might get one this summer.

Anyways, our current setup is a 55 gal with eight koi. Each one being of various sizes. The largest one is (length-wise) 8 inches. The smallest is about 1.5 inch. I know we are way, way over stock. I try to change the water 50% every week. The filter is one of those hanging filters. We are sorely under-filtered but I like those media pads as I can pull them out to save bacteria colonies and speed up cycling of new tanks. But lately, I haven't been keeping up with changing the water. Also, green algae over-growth and I have yet to scape them off. I am not sure about diet but we got those pellets and I feed them every three days to cut back on the crap they put out. I try not to overfeed them and actually bought a divider between the bigger ones and smaller for them to get fair share.

I planning on digging but I am not sure if I can go deep. I was thinking of digging maybe a feet or two, then build a stone wall around the hole and patch it up to increase the height of the pond to maybe five or six feet. Is this a good idea? I know that it might not be ideal but it'll giver more volume and I am pretty sure that in the winter I would close down the pond and hole the koi in a tank for the winter. I can try making a wall of dirt behind the stone wall for better insulation but I am not sure since the weather seems to be really cold and I am afraid of the pond completely freezing.

Anyways, any advice would do.

Hi Paul,

Let's start with the eye. The damage you see is an injury coupled with bad water quality.The eye might have healed well in a better environment, but it is not going to respond to any treatment now. Leave it alone.

Let's go on with the statement that koi are not indoor fish. The rule of thumb for water volume to support healthy koi is (for koi 8 inches or smaller) 50 gallons of water for each INCH OF FISH. You are correct in assuming that you are horribly overstocked and underfiltered. No commercially-made aquarium filter is capable of keeping up with the ammonia production of one small koi, let alone eight. They are designed to handle the much lighter demands of tropical fish.

Find a way to restrain your mother. Duct tape sometimes works.

50% water changes are good, but they should be occurring every two days with dechlorinated water, not once a week.

The process involved in building an outdoor pond starts with JULIE. This is the free service that comes out and tells you what is buried where and where it is safe to dig. The next step is indeed a permit. The ordinances covering your pond are the same as if you were installing a swimming pool. Get the permit BEFORE you dig unless you enjoy paying hefty fines. The highest berm practical in this climate is about 18 inches. The shallowest pond depth (given koi health and predation) is 4 feet, with five to six preferable. External, high-efficiency filtration is a must. Skimping on that will kill your fish.

Don't worry about the neighborhood cats. They won't go in the water. Herons and raccoons will, as will mink (Yes, we do have mink!) Deep water will discourage the herons and raccoons. There are no defenses against mink.

Taking your koi in for the winter only works if you have an indoor facility of 500 to 1000 gallons capacity, serviced by the same high-quality filtration that your outdoor pond has. Your 55 gallon tank will kill all of your fish that have been living in the better conditions of your outdoor pond.

Please go to www.mpks.org and read all of the articles and all of the Help Files. It'll get you started.

Bob

dr bob hi,
I'm about three years into my pond. A year ago i purchased uv lights that really helped with my green water . My pond water (12x12 3-4 feet deep) is now very clear however algae is still growing on the bottom of my pond which is made of all rock boulders. I have about 60% coverage from pond lillies. I am trying to not treat it chemically but feel i have nothing left to try. I have about 11 small koi fish. What would you recommend?Also do you have a list of places to buy koi?thanks in advance for any advice.
mike

Leave it alone! It is your friend. During the winter, when your filter bacteria are asleep, it will sop up the ammonia that your fish are constantly excreting. It will provide a nice winter "salad" for them to nibble on. Trying to kill it will load your pond with chemicals that you will NEVER get rid of and the dead algae will create high levels of organic pollution that will favor the growth of anaerobic bacteria and parasites.

If it gets too shaggy for your taste, a biff brush on a broom handle will take care of the problem.

Buying koi now is a BAD IDEA. Unless you are planning to winter them over indoors, you do not have time to get them through six weeks of preventive isolation in your quarantine tank and into your pond before the really nasty cold sets in. Stay away from pet shops, their fish are reliably diseased and parasite-ridden.

Your best bet is to locate a koi show in your area next spring and shop there.

Happy ponding.

Bob

Hi there,

I am not a member but am in the process of building a pond in northern CA. It is about 7' wide x 14' long x 4.5' deep at it's deepest averaging 3' deep. At one end it is dug into the hillside. The other end is filled concrete block.

The walls are pretty much vertical. My intent is to use a liner but my wife hates the liner and wants to rock or tile it. I know with the vertical walls, I will have a lot of liner folds especially at the top which will make tiling very difficult if not impossible.

Anyway, my questions are A) have you ever seen a liner pond tiled? B) will the mortar / grout have a negative effect on the water quality and fish? C) Is there a sealer that will help with keeping the mortar and grout from leeching into the water. Thanks in advance for any help on this one.

Roy

Hi Roy,

I'm kind of opinionated here, being a poor Midwesterner who has to live through Chicago winters. I am a huge fan of liner ponds, largely because they are easy to build and are low maintenance when installed. A properly constructed liner pond will last for 40 to 50 years if the liner is protected from UV (i.e.: full of water) and provides a safe, smooth surface that will not injure my koi when they rub against it. Chicago winters cause heaving and ground shifts. So do California earthquakes. A flexible liner is not as likely to fail catastrophically under environmental stressors as a rigid masonry wall. Liner ponds can be made to look natural with proper design, which tends to be the preferred style back here.

In specific answer to your questions:

A) Never. There is no adhesive on the planet that will reliably hold tile to butyl rubber. If you can't talk your wife out of tile, build her a nice little water feature out of cast concrete and tile that she loves. It'll foul with algae within a month and require constant scrubbing in order to see the pretty patterns, but it'll be tile. Remember that we are not talking about a chlorine-toxic swimming pool here. With excellent filtration, the water will be gin-clear, but a good koi pond is a living system and stuff will grow. You want a layer of algae on the walls and bottom, you DO NOT want rocks on the bottom. You do want a bottom drain and a skimmer operating independently with separate pump and filter for each. You DEFINITELY do not want to have to scrub the walls every week to look at the walls. The stars of the show are the koi, not the pond walls.

B) Absolutely. Mortar and grout will leach more or less constantly over the first couple of years, raising your pH.

C) Nope.

Happy ponding and good luck with your wife.

Bob

Hi,

We are having a small formal water garden installed next week. It is going to be about 6X6 rectangular in size, and about 2 ft deep at its deepest point.

Next year we will be placing a few aquatic plants in it with a small fountain and maybe a few goldfish.

The sides of the pond will about 18" tall and be made of paver bricks with a liner on the bottom. Only about a foot and a half will be dug out below ground level.

We are familiar with keeping fish and the biological process, as we belonged to Greenwater Aquarists Society of Chicago for 6 years and have raised many types of tropical fish (this is, Angelfish, small chiclids, etc) indoors over the years. But this is our first venture into "ponds"..(not counting a small whisky barrel pond we had several years ago, which we really enjoyed.)

We want to start small and work our way into something larger, if we like this type of activity.

First, how should we winterize this small pond. It has no fish or plants in it this year. Should we keep water in it? If so, do we need to keep a heater in it to keep it from expanding and ruining the walls or the liner from lifting? Do we need to cover it??

Secondly, next year what do you suggest we do to starting it up with a few plants and a couple of fish? What size pump should be get? Do we need added filtration?

We'd appreciate any help you can give us to get started with this project. I'm hoping to be successful.

Thanks, Sue

Hi Sue!

A pond that small should be drained completely and cleaned at the end of the season, the plants either brought inside to a large aquarium or treated as expendable annuals and the fish also brought in for the winter. The water garden itself should be covered to prevent damage to the liner and to prevent accumulation of winter debris.

Your calculated volume is about 500 gallons. If you are stocking goldfish, especially fancy goldfish, they require great water quality. You should plan on installing a filter capable of handling 500-1000 gallons of throughput per hour and a pump robust enough to supply it at that rate. There are a lot of choices and options here. Haunt the web for Goldfish Society blogs and websites.

Join your local water gardening club and mercilessly pick the brains of the experienced ponders. You'll get different answers from each person you ask, but that just makes it more fun.

Beware the Three Laws:

1) There is always a better fish.

2) There is always a better filter.

3) There is NEVER enough water.

Happy ponding!

Bob

I have just finished a new 3000 gallon koi pond and am wondering how this large volume of water will show an ammonia spike when cycling? Or if it will be very minute? I used Microbe Lift gel on the pads and Microbe Lift Liquid in the pond. Added 3 small koi 4-6" and 1 koi 12". I am planning to wait 1 week and test the water. If all is good should I add another koi or 2? The weather here is starting to cool off, but probably 5-6 weeks left before it will get very cold. I am hoping to move in a few more koi to this pond before winter hits and the filter bacteria go dormant. thanks for the help.

Hi.

Regardless of how big a new pond is or how much bacteria-booster you throw at it, a new pond is a new pond. It will have new pond syndrome regardless of what you do and you'll need to be prepared for it.

3000 gallons is a modest-sized pond, and depending on your filters, may be able to support, when mature, up to 10 small koi or 6 large ones. Steve Childers suggests 300 gallons for each 12-18 inch fish, and at least 500 gallons for any fish larger than 18 inches. Since koi grow rapidly, you could reach the point of overpopulation very rapidly indeed.

Commercial and hobbyist bacteria boosters are, in general, useless. The populations of bacterial species that perform the nitrification process that converts ammonia (toxic at warm temperatures and higher pH) to nitrite (toxic at very low concentrations at any temperature and pH) to relatively non-toxic nitrate number in the hundreds, are naturally occurring, are unique to each pond and are almost never active or available in commercial products. If you are starting a new pond, do not expect ANY bioconversion of ammonia to nitrite for at least four to six weeks. The dreaded "nitrite spike" is inevitable, will occur as the first populations of bacteria come online, and will clear slowly as the more slowly-developing nitrite-consumers begin to appear. Remember that you are constructing a new biome here. It takes time.

"Instant" filter cultures can be purchased from specialty aquarium support centers. Unfortunately, these are custom-designed live bacterial cultures intended for startup use by outfits like the Shedd Aquarium, when they are receiving a new shipment of rare fish and need bioconversion Right Now! They have a shelf life measured in hours and cost thousands of dollars per application.

You've started your pond rather late in the season. It is likely that falling water temperatures will significantly slow the development of your filter system and you may just begin to see your nitrite-to nitrate processing begin to show up just as your pond water temps drop below 50 degrees and you have to stop feeding.

My advice is as follows:

1) Water test for ammonia, pH, temperature, nitrite, salt (see below) and alkalinity at least every other day, and for the first two or three weeks, every day.

2) Feed very sparingly, no more than once a day.

3) DO NOT ADD ANY MORE FISH UNTIL NEXT YEAR. Do not add those fish until your nitrite levels are consistantly zero. Yes, you will see the ammonia peak/nitrite spike pattern every spring. It is a common factor in backyard ponding, unless you are planning on heating your pond all winter.

4) Plan on doing a 10-15% water change at least twice a week. You have no bioconversion, no algae, and a bunch of ammonia-producing fish. The only way to get rid of it is to dilute it down.

5) As your nitrite levels appear (or better, before!) add salt to your pond ("blue bag" solar salt from Menards is best) to a concentration of 3 pounds per 100 gallons, and maintain this concentration until your nitrite levels are zero. This will prevent "brown blood" disease (the koi equivalent of CO poisoning) caused by the nitrite.

6) Remember to isolate any new fish in a heavily filtered quarantine facility ENTIRELY SEPARATE from your pond for at least 6 weeks to prevent disease introduction and mortality. If you do not have a quarantine tank, that will be your winter project.

7) Go to www.mpks.org and read everything you can find on new pond startup, winterizing and filtration. It'll help.

Hobbyists new to the challenges of koi keeping all make the same errors with their first ponds. It is so hard to wait, and none of us has ever met a fish we didn't like. Patience is critical. It'll pay big benefits. Remember that the single thing that you can do to keep your koi healthy is to give them the best water quality possible, year 'round.

Happy ponding.

Bob

I am building a pond approximately 23x19x3.5 with about a 30 f'oot waterfall/stream that will have about a 5' lift.

I plan on using a skimmer on the opposite end from the waterfall intake, but may not feed that water up into the falls/stream but instead run it back towards the bottom of the pond ( any advantage to this, other than not having to run a larger pump to accommodate the lift?).

How large of a pump and what is the best kind of filter to use for the pond/waterfall. I am looking for one that can be backwashed as opposed to have to rinse out bags ( which is the set up I have now).

I have 2 turtles about 30 goldfish and only 2 koi right now but would like to add a few more koi. My existing pond has supported them fine but I want bigger!! I am thinking of using one of those floating islands for shade/shelter for the fish and turtles, have you heard much feedback on them.

The water lilies have not done well the last two years between the combination of koi and turtles picking at them is there any suggestion on how to get them to grow better, and any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you

Hi Nancy!

Sounds like a nice pond, with a calculated volume just short of 12,500 gallons. Your plans, however, incorporate a series of potentially fatal engineering errors that you will regret for the life of the pond and will be correctible only when you rip it out to rebuild.

1) A pond of that size with koi in residence needs to have its full volume exchanged every 90 to 120 minutes. A skimmer alone is not up to the task. I urge you to incorporate at least one bottom drain into the design, running as an independent system to its own set of filters. 3.5 feet is deeper than the maximum depth that a skimmer can handle without having a stagnant area at the bottom of the pond. Water moves in a laminar fashion, and without the bottom drain, your pond bottom will be a haven for anaerobic bacteria and debris. Bottom drains, especially in bare-liner ponds, are self cleaning and allow for thorough water mixing.

2) You are planning on a pond that your herons and raccoons will love and will come back to often. All your fish will be named "Lunch". Your new pond , with its expanded surface footprint, will be instantly visible to herons, and 3.5 feet is still optimum wading depth for them. Go deeper; 4.5 feet minimum, and 5 to 6 feet if you can do it.(6 ft deep boosts your volume to 21,375 gallons in the same footprint!) If you want koi, this is optimum depth, both for koi health and for defense against the Dark Arts - er - predation. If you have otters, mink or cormorants, nothing will help you, but 5 to 6 feet with a vertical drop-off from the edge will frustrate raccoons and heron. Consider building up from ground level with landscaping block. This buys you not only more volume, but protects your pond from runoff (lawn chemicals are very toxic to fish!) and makes a very nice scenic statement in your yard. It also makes any external pump you use self-priming. The elevation above grade provides a natural place to sit and interact with your fish and helps prevent accidental falls and adolescent immersions.

3) Routing the water from skimmer back to the bottom of the pond is a recipe for disaster. There will be no opportunity to aerate the water, your fish will die of hypoxia and your pond will smell of rotten eggs. Dissolved oxygen is introduced into water by surface turbulence. The best tools for this are multileveled, loud, splashy waterfalls and long, fast, shallow streams with rocks on the bottom to increase the turbulence. That 30- foot stream sounds great, but where were you going to get the water to run it if not from your skimmer? Adding a series of small falls along its length with lots of splash and finishing it off at pond's edge with something complex and dramatic in the way of splash will ensure lots of oxygen for your fish to breathe. Adding a Bakki tower or a bioreactor to your filter array will also improve oxygen transfer and will also blow off Nitrogen gas and CO2, further improving your water quality. A bypass from filter to pond surface is a good idea for winter to eliminate water loss due to ice dams, but not as a summer running condition. Do not ever believe that airstones aerate your water. They merely move it around. Turbulence at the air-water interface is key.

4) If you want healthy koi, DO NOT PUT GRAVEL ON THE BOTTOM OF THE POND!

5) Buy your pumps on the basis of their ability to move the entire volume in your pond through your filters once every 60 to 90 minutes, accounting for flow loss due to lift above grade and pipe friction due to run length and direction change. Our website (www.mpks.org) has tables to help you with the pipes and fittings, and any pump worth using (I hate submersibles!) comes with a flow graph which tells how much water it will pump how high off the surface of your pond. Buy accordingly, and get one for the skimmer and one for the bottom drains. Strongly consider 3-inch pipe throughout.

6) I have no particular preference for any one type of filter. Any filter system should be bought based on its ability to handle the flows intended to be put through it, rather than on the manufacturer's claim of its ability to serve a pond of a given volume. These claims always exaggerate the filter's capabilities and never take fish load into account. If you have lots of room to hide them, open filter systems that receive water via gravity and have the pump situated between filter and falls work great, and many of the designs, like the Big Sister and the Nexus, are very low-maintenance. If you do not have a lot of room, closed, pressurized filters may work better for you. Your best bet is to visit a lot of ponds with different systems and see what has worked for other folks. The overriding principle has to be redundancy. Your fish health and survival depends on intact, reliable filtration and pumping systems, active and running 24/7. Parallel filters with separate water feeds and pumps ensure a safety margin for your fish should one of your pumps or filters go down. A backup generator is also a great idea. Remember that any filter system will die if not kept aerated in less than 6 hours. Our power failures in River Forest average 8 to 12 hours per occurrence.

7) Floating islands are fun.

Hope this helps.

Bob

My name is Nicole and my grandmother and I are digging a fish pond... Our fish pond is going to be 5ft deep at one end and 3 ft deep at the other end and 20 ft in length. I live in Missouri and I wanted to know if it is safe to leave the fish out for the winter?

Hi Nicole!

Welcome to the hobby! First, while you are still digging, I'd urge you to go to our website (www.mpks.org) and read up on pond construction (Mike White's articles are excellent) and everything you can find on filtration.

I'd also urge you to dig to a constant depth of at least five feet throughout your pond. The fish won't register the shallower water as anything other than a smaller environment, and since you're going to have "gin-clear" water after you read up on filtration, the extra depth won't interfere with your ability to see them. The extra depth will buy you greater volume, which in turn will get you better thermal and pH stability.

If you are planning a "water garden" featuring mostly aquatic plants and maybe some goldfish, feel free to decorate the bottom any way you please. If you plan on keeping koi, *keep your bottom liner bare* and install a bottom drain during initial construction. This is critical for fish health and pond maintenance in ponds deeper than about 32 inches.

In answer to your initial question, koi are cold-water fish and can tolerate water temperatures down to about 38 F. Your real risks to fish health over the winter are decaying organic material on the bottom (hence the NO GRAVEL rule and the bottom drain), the risk of freezing over (which prevents gas exchange at the surface and allows buildup of noxious gases from decaying organics) and sudden temperature fluctuations in winter due to hail, freezing rain and snow.

The organic debris problem is solved by a fall rinse-out behind your decorative edge rocks each year and a bare-liner bottom. The rest is most efficiently dealt with by planning in a removable "poly house" as part of the original construction. Kits for just this application are manufactured by "Versa-Quonset", are relatively inexpensive, erect and strike in about a day, and will keep your pond safe from wind, crud, snow and ice all winter. Your fish can stay outside safely and if you build it right, you can have a little "bolt-hole" of spring in the depths of winter. Your fish will thank you.

Bob

I recently purchased a home with a pond that I believe to be 500-750 gallons but I have no idea what to do with it! There aren't any fish and I haven't seen any plants pop up yet. It is tarp lined and all that I've noticed growing is mosquito larva. I would like to keep it, but I don't want it to be too much work. I have cleaned it out thoroughly with a net and have installed a pump and filter. Where do I go from here?

What you have in your back yard is a potential ticket to disaster. If you are really interested in the water gardening hobby, your best bet is to pump all the water out, pull the tarp out and discard it, fill in the hole and then join a water gardening or koi-keeping club and start learning about the hobby.

Do not take the filter or pump out of their boxes unless you are sure that they will do what you think they will do. That tarpaulin was never designed to hold water, and it will begin to leak. Your volume may support a few goldfish, but without aeration your oxygen levels will not support much in the way of fish health. The small volume will make the water temperature unstable, in turn making the pond vulnerable to major fluctuations in pH. You'll also get considerable drops in alkalinity with each rainstorm which will give you more pH problems.

From a pump/filter standpoint, submersible pumps are a pain to maintain and fail frequently, usually due to fouling. The absence of a surface skimmer will guarantee sludge on the bottom and anaerobic conditions in the sludge; bad for fish health.

Please read the articles on pond planning and filtration on our website, and browse through our "help file" section.

Trying to maintain what you have will leave you with a very unfavorable opinion of what can be a wonderful hobby.

Bob

Bob

My husband and I live in Lyons and are going to be putting in a new pond this year. We've had a pre-formed pond from Sam's Club, that worked nicely for the past 5 years, but we are now ready to move up in size, since we want a couple more Koi and the one's we have are bigger now.

We're going back and forth with each other over whether or not we should have a raised pond or not. I don't care too much for a raised pond since I would like something more natural looking. I know that to winter your fish outside the depth needs to be below the frost level (18" sound right?). Now, if it's a raised pond my thought is that it would still need to be 18" below ground level. Or does it just 18" deep, like my husband thinks?

Also, what kind of luck do people with ponds in our area have with bog filtration? We brought in our hyacinth and water lettuce for the winter, also, and I wonder if that's a good choice in addition to a regular filter and skimmer set up.

Final question; if we winter our fish outside, heater or no heater? I understand no heater, don't feed, don't break the ice if any forms, shut off the waterfall etc. - is this accurate info? I can't believe how much conflicting information is out there. It gets confusing.

Any help we can get would be appreciated!

My first suggestion is that you join MPKS and attend a few meetings and talk to a bunch of our members. You may still be as confused at the finish, but you will have had a lot of fun and met some really neat people. The next thing you need to do is do the pond tour and get an idea of the multiple solutions to the Midwest Pond Problem. If you want to get a jump on the construction season, feel free to visit our pond in River Forest. Even in winter, it is instructive. We are home most weekends and are always happy to show off. Now you need to read all of Mike White's articles on the website and go through the FAQs. The answers to questions you have not yet asked are there.

Okay, on to your questions:

1) Raised or not? - You have to understand, I'm very biased on this subject. Our pond is raised 18 inches above grade, and we love it. The surround is weathered Creta Stone lined with rammed backfill. At the point nearest our patio, the earth packing is about 12 inches thick. Elsewhere it is as much as 4 to 5 feet wide, allowing for decorative and marginal plantings. The raised masonry allows us to sit comfortably at the pond's edge and have our fish within easy reach for hand feeding. We do not have to worry about runoff from our lawn or our neighbor's property, The water level above ground automatically assures prime on our pumps. Anybody falling into our pond really has to work at it and can't claim that they did not see it. It also bought us an additional 1000 gallons that we did not have to dig for!

2) Frost Line - Weather aside, you need at least 4 feet of depth for happy and nicely-shaped koi. Five feet is better, and any ponder you ask will tell you that he wished he'd gone "just one foot further down" when rebuilding his new pond. Deeper is better from a water quality and fish health standpoint. Deep ponds have smaller fluctuations of temperature on hot days and are much more resistant to pH swings. Any pond deeper than 18-24 inches needs to be served with a skimmer *and* a bottom drain, and you need to talk to some knowlegable people without construction-type axes to grind before you dig. For freeze-safety in this climate, a minimum depth from the water surface of 36 inches is advisable. Also a good idea is a preplanned and designed-in method of covering the pond with leaf netting in the fall and plastic in the winter. The netting reduces the amount of plant grundge you have to pull off the bottom during fall cleanout, and the plastic provides greenhouse effect to keep your pond protected from the wind chill and maintain it largely ice-free. It also gives your plantings a nice jump on the spring.

3) Bogs? - Pretty, and of some help with filtration, but you need huge volumes of water to get away with it. The only attractive bog-filtered pond I know of is Bill Stepan's pond in Yorkville. It contains 30,000 gallons, and about 1/3 of it is in his bog filter at any one time. Kevin Novack is also a proponent of bog filtration, but his filter ponds are kinda ugly. If you want koi in any number or size, you will have to employ bioconverters, mechanical filters and probably other adjuncts. Come look at my stuff. I don't have one of everything,(that would be Bry Bateman) but I'm close to it!

4) Outside? All winter? - Sure, and you don't need an expensive pond heater either. If you cover the pond, all you need is a small oil-filled electric radiator under the cover. As long as your water temp stays around 36-38 degrees, your fish will manage the winter season just fine. You need to maintain an area of the surface ice-free to allow gas exchange, and the cover and a high-capacity air pump/airstone arrangement with the stone set 1 foot under the surface will work just fine. Your pumps should be off, to allow the warmer water to stratify on the bottom. Your fish will congregate there. If you do freeze over, the ice must be *melted* through. Striking the ice to break it will damage the fish's balance systems. Kinda like a concussion to us.

Hope this helps. Come visit. Ask questions!

Bob

I have been reading all of the emails sent, and I have a few more questions that hopefully you can answer/or go into more detail for me.

1. We are installing a pond 9 ft x 35 ft. It will have a waterfall and be circulated with the Large Clean Seep Skimmer Filter, Standard Biofalls Filter and a 4500 Pump. We plan on stocking both regular Koi and Butterfly Koi. Is there any plus' and/or minus' on stocking both types together?

2. We would also like to introduce either: Western Painted Turtle, Mississippi Map Turtle or even a Jumbo Pond Tutle. I hear a lot of different stories: they carry and/or create harmful bacteria that will/could harm the koi and kill them. How do I know what to believe. One of the emails I was reading on your website was that they can bring in Leeches. Is this all based on if the turtle has been quarantined or not?

3. The Pleco (algae eater), would it be okay to get 2 of them for my pond to help keep the algae under control and bring them in for the winter? I know if we do get turtles that we will have to bring those in for the winter, so bringing the Pleco in wouldn't be hard. And is the Pleco bad for the koi?

4. Lastly, what is the scoop with the snails. Are they good for a pond? What is the plus' and minus' to the snails with the koi? We have a pool approx. 4 feet from our pond. Would we need to worry about them getting out of the pond and going into our pool? Oh and the hot tub is only 2 feet away. Your help on clearing some of these concerns of mine would be a huge help. Our pond is being built on April 21st and I would like to get these questions answered.

5. I am sorry, one more question. With the koi and depending on the answers, possibly turtles/snails; Is the Biological Filter (BioFalls) and the Aquascape 4500 Pond Pump good for my needs or would you recommend the bead filters? I would enjoy a gin clear and as much as an algae free pond as possible without harming the fish. I just don't know which is the better route to go. What are the plus' and minus'?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Alright, Vanessa, I'll give this my best shot, but you
*really* need to join the MPKS and come to some meetings!

1) 9 x 35, fine. How deep? If you are planning on keeping koi, your minimum depth should be 4 feet at the *shallowest*, and as much as 6 feet if you are serious about this. For a good koi pond, you will need a bare liner bottom and a bottom drain. Given the configuration you suggest, you'll need two bottom drains. Do not believe your contractor if he's telling you that koi will be he.althy in a shallow pond. Do not believe him if he tells you that rocks on the bottom are "low maintenance". Shallow ponds are otherwise known as MacRaccoon's and MacHeron's. They are very vulnerable to predation. They are prone to wide temperature shifts which will stress your koi and your filters. Rocks on the bottom collect mulm and sludge, which has to be cleaned out *every year*, usually by the contractor, which he will charge you $$$$$ for. A properly designed bare liner, bottom-drained pond is virtually self-cleaning.

If you dig your pond to a depth of 4 feet, you are talking about 11,200 gallons here, and a pump that circulates 4500 gallons per hour is insufficient. You need to be able to circulate the entire volume of your pond through your filter at a minimum of once per hour.

If you are keeping koi, you'll need much more filter than a simple skimmer/biofalls will provide. I urge you to talk to Mike White at White Water Filters in Batavia before you begin your dig. He can be emailed at mikew@whitewaterfilters.com.

Koi and Butterfly koi are all the same species, the butterflys were the result of a cross-breeding between Japanese koi and an Asian carp in an attempt to restore some hybrid vigor and disease resistance to the ornamentals. What they got was vigorous, but had long fins. The Japanese hate 'em. Us gaijin love 'em. Koi and butterfly koi co-exist just fine.

2) Do Not Import Turtles! Besides being ILLEGAL to import them from their natural habitats, it is very poor conservation practice. They are all natural predators and will feast on your smaller fish, and as they grow, will take stabs at your bigger fish too. Turtles are amphibs, and are not a controllable organism. They will escape, enter the local biome, and disrupt it.

3) Pleckys do just fine in ponds. They are prickly enough that the koi do not mess with them. They are tropicals, so they can't go into the pond until the water temp is 70 degrees or higher, and they must be pulled out and maintained indoors when it gets cold out in late fall. DO NOT DO THE TURTLES!

4) You'll get snails whether you want them or not, usually as passengers on your aquatic plants. They won't make a bit of difference to your algae control. That only works in small aquarium environments. Hair algae needs intensive verge plantings of greedy marginals and deep plantings of water lily. Further control is exerted by Pleckys and a toilet brush attached to a long pole. Floating algae is controllable with adequate shade and a high-intensity UV unit installed just after your final filter. As far as the pool and hot tub are concerned, the levels of chlorine required by code for those devices will promptly kill any form of aquatic life you could care to name. Please make sure that your pond is situated so that there is NO chance of runoff to it from either your pool or hot tub. Chlorine is deadly poison to a pond.

5) No. The system you describe is not adequate for koi in any significant number. *Please* talk to Mike White. *Before* you allow your current contractor to stick you with something you can't maintain. Come to a meeting. Talk to ANYBODY!

From your second email:

1) Quarantine is absolutely essential. For details, go to the website and look up the article. Any new fish you buy must be isolated for at least three to four weeks and observed carefully prior to introduction to your pond's stable population. If you are starting a new pond, this constitutes the first fish you put in. Any further additions get quarantined in a separate tank with a separate filter and air system. Do not trust any vendor's promises about prior isolation, unless you know him well, trust him and know where he lives so that you can go there and beat the sn*t out of him when your fish die from a disease he brought in. We use two indoor vats, both with well-established box filter systems. (150 and 200 gallons, respectively)

2) New fish can be added (once they clear quarantine) at any time the water is warm enough to support them, to the ability of your filters to keep the water quality good. If you want gin-clear water, Aquascapes can't do it. You will need at least a pre-filter type sellting vat, a large box or bead filter, a protein extractor of some type, a bioreactor or trickle tower, and a UV unit. Talk to Mike.

3) You can decorate any way you want, but tropical aquatics will not survive a Chicago winter. Stay with hardy perennials native to this region. Less work and heartbreak.

Hope this helped.

Bob

4) I'd love a recommendation on what you think is the best product for testing pond water and how frequently it should be performed. I have API 5 in 1 pond strips.

Hi Bob,

I live in Northern Illinois, near Rockford which is Zone 4B.

I have a 3,000 gal pond with max depth of 6 feet and has partially raised walls one side. Pond is 12 ft by 7 feet. I have a bottom drain, 3” line running up, to artesian pro 12 inches above water level, then to an ultima II 4000, to uv then split to a water fall box and a mid level return. This line is next to my house and the filter is mostly buried. There is a pvc cleanout installed at water level before the pump.

Skimmer is on a separate line, to a different artesian pro pump then to a different waterfall box and to a different mid level return.

My bottom drain is my problem. I have no mid level collection for my BD or a way to shut it off below the freeze line unless I plug it at bottom of pond. Will I disturb my water temperature levels too much by pulling water from my BD in the winter?

If I do not move this water will I crack my pvc BD line?

I have lots of advice from many people, but none of it covers my BD line.

I am concerned about my BD line because my bottom drain line will have water in it unless I plug it somehow and suck out the water or keep the water moving.

I could replace the main pump with the smaller skimmer pump, same design artesians, and then move less water through and move the big pump indoors. But I am still moving water from the bottom to the top again.

I am looking for a knowledgeable guess as to what would work so I do not lose a pump or crack my bottom drain line.

I can cover the pond with a standard pvc pipe and 7 mil plastic cover.

I can also add a heater of some kind to the pond.

But in the end the BD line is the cause of my lack of sleep.

Thanks for your time.

George

Hello George,

Sounds like an absolutely fantastic pond. I would go ahead and cover the pond but would try to avoid using PVC pipe. As strong as it looks in short lengths, PVC pipe tends to be woefully flexible at the worst of times. Any snow load at all on top of the plastic will bend and collapse your PVC and less you are able to construct a fairly steep pitched "A-frame" arrangement that will allow the snow to slide off easily.

A hoop house or Versa Quonset kit would work much better and the one of quarter-inch galvanized pipe stands up infinitely better than the stresses of bad weather.

However you do it, I strongly recommend that you cover the pond. Once covered, something as simple as a small electric radiator at the edge of the pond under the plastic will be enough to keep your temperatures stable and your water unfrozen. That, in turn, will allow you to keep your bottom drain running. If you route that exclusively to your mid-level return you'll keep everything circulating nicely and have some mechanical filtration through the winter. Your fish will thank you.

The theory that you need to maintain still waters and that the water down the bottom of pond is warmer, somehow, then the rest of the pond turns out to be true only for ponds in excess of 20 to 25 feet deep. Backyard ponds do not follow that particular set of physics.

We've been doing this with our 4400 gallons capacity, 5 foot deep pond for about 10 years now. It works a treat. As long as you have the skimmer undercover, you can shut it down without worrying about it. If it's convenient, blowing the line clear, especially if it's near the surface or exposed to the weather would be a good idea.

Happy ponding,

Bob

I have a 27,000 gal pond in WI.

Do you know anything about using those pond breathers I know most folks hoop and heat but the shape of mine does not lend it self for it. My pond will freeze all the way across the top so the pond breathers are the only means of a gas exchange. I do have a dozen aerator stones pulled to the surface that will bubble.

Amanda

By "pond breather" I assume you mean a concentration of high-flow air stones near the surface of your pond. The constant agitation at the surface keeps a hole ice-free.

As long as you maintain that high agitation and do not allow the ice to form a bubble over your hole, your gas exchange, though suboptimal, will be adequate to get you through the winter.

Covering the pond with a greenhouse arrangement is far superior. What about your pond makes this solution difficult?

Hello, This is our first winter for our pond with koi. 6,500 gallon with waterfall pump and aeration at bottom going,our problem is we keep finding our koi inside are skimmer still alive so we gently keep putting them back into the open hole from all the ice.

What is happening and how to stop this or is this ok? Another problem all are cool green frogs at least 4 that made a home in are pond this past summer we have found dead pieces that were stuck to the filter inside the waterfall opening. What is happening and how to prevent this next winter. Please help.

Winter ponding. Ugh.

Suggestions as follows:

Cover the pond with some sort of greenhouse structure to prevent freezing.

Cover the skimmer inlet with a coarse fish-friendly screen to keep them out.

The frogs are hibernating and don't have any place in a bare liner pond to dig in. They'll go where the current drags them. At shutdown, put a couple of large tubs on the bottom with 4 or 5 inches of generic kitty litter in them for the frogs to burrow down into and sleep. Cover the surface with river rock to discourage gardening. Screen off the pump inlet or just shut down and remove your submersible pump.

Hope this helps --

Bob

My husband and son dug out a small pond (5 feet by 3 feet, 2 1/2 feet deep) about 4 years ago. We have about four, 7-inch koi and eight 4 inch shubunkins in the pond. Our water quality has been quite clear for the past three years and our fish have been thriving.

We had our pond professionally designed and redone about 10 days ago. The installer removed our fish along with more than enough water from our old pond, to keep them in a holding tank until he was finished completing the new pond. Ater the pond was completed, he put new water in the pond (we have Chicago city water), and then added our fish along with the old water from the holding tank.

Unfortunately, the water has become murkier and murkier; ( we can barely see the fish until they are almost at the surface) it is a golden, light brown color, which I was wondering may have been caused by dust from the new rock materials, but sadder than the fact that we cannot see anything in the pond, one of our beautiful butterfly koi was found floating at the surface the other day. I'm concerned more fish will die.

We have a large filter, a smaller skimmer box and a 2 1/2 foot waterfall that is providing good aeration. What should we do?

Hi Linda,

I'm always dismayed when a relative beginner with a small pond falls victim to a contractor with no actual ponding experience. Unfortunately, what appears to have happened is a combination of what we call "new pond syndrome" and the effects of Chicago tap water on a pre-existing system. I'm hoping that your filtration is the same set-up that you were running your smaller pond with. This will give you half a chance of restoring at least some bioconversion rather quicker than if all of the filters are new.

Your new pond is just that. It's new. Your older pond had an established ecosystem with filter bacteria embedded in the rocks and in the liner as well as in the pipes and filters. It was reasonably well-balanced with your smaller fish. Your move to enlarge the pond was a good one given the robust growth of your for Koi. Your old pond had a volume roughly 280 gallons, which was clearly insufficient for your Koi, given that the appropriate amount of water for Koi runs about 200 gallons per fish for fish less than 8 inches long.

You haven't told me how big your new pond is, but regardless of the size it still has absolutely no biofiltration available. Whatever biological activity was available in the filter died when the system was shut down, unless you used the the filter from the old pond to run your holding tank. If all of your filtration is brand-new, it is basically virgin and barren of life. Even if you are using your old filters, the heavy infusion of chlorine has killed off all your resident bacteria. If this is the case it's going to take 6 to 8 weeks to restore its ability to convert ammonia to non-toxic byproducts. Your new rocks and liner are in a similar state. The best you can supply at this time is frequent water changes, zero feeding, and patience.

The brownish discoloration that you have noticed is a combination of dust from the rocks, dissolved organic materials and probably construction residue from the liner. In the process of refilling your pond, the contractor used Chicago tap water to make up the extra volume. If he did this without pretreating the water he was using to fill your new pond, the chlorine and chloramines in the tap water effectively killed off all of the viable bacteria in the older pond water. If the new pond is significantly larger than the old pond was, there was probably enough new water and therefore enough chlorine to significantly damage the gills on all your fish.

You're going to need a fair amount of patience and an equal amount of energy to save the situation. You will need a sizable quantity of dechlorinator (Stress-X or NovAqua) or an in-line activated charcoal filter (available for about $40 at Wanamaker's) and lots and lots of water changes.

Don't bother buying bacterial boosters. These tend to be relatively worthless from the standpoint of reestablishing nitrifying bacterial populations. You'll need to be water testing at least three times a week, looking for ammonia, nitrite, pH and alkalinity. With the water changes, you will need to be neutralizing chlorine and chloramine present in Chicago tap water. This means that you will also need to check your pond water frequently for these chemicals as well.

The murkiness and particulate matter will filter out or settle out in time. Water changes will help here as well. The brown discoloration caused by the dissolved organics will clear with the water changes and will clear more quickly if you can add a protein extractor to your filter array.

Growing pains are hard. Major changes to what was a balanced ecology always cause casualties of one sort or another. Don't lose faith. Warmer weather is on the way and your pond will recover given patience and a certain amount of effort.

I invite you to read the articles on our website at www.mpks.org. There's a lot of stuff there on new pond syndrome, filtration and spring start up.

In spite of everything, happy ponding,

Bob

I just installed a new AQUA UV ULTIMA 2000. After installation, the 1/2 HP PENTAIR pump ran through the filter and the 57 watt UV sterilizer, around the clock ...no problems.

The next day, the pump was inadvertently turned off at approximately 6 PM. At 6 AM the next morning I was saddened to see that 4 of my 7 beautiful (large) KOI were dead and a fifth (small) one was very distressed. I had observed that the remaining 2 large KOI and the goldfish, were sucking at the surface, as if oxygen deprived. I could just deduce that it was just that...no aeration but I prior to this incident I routinely ran the pump timer from 7 AM to 7 PM and off for 12 hours, during the night, with no problems--- our electric costs .32/KWH

The facts:

• 1500 gallon pond with a surface area measuring 10' x 14' Waterfall, 30' away with a smaller pond and stream to the main pond
• Water clear but lots of algae on all rock surfaces
• No chemicals were being used
• Ambient air temperature-low 90's
• No city water added at this time
• Very mature pond conditions

Have not lost a fish in the two years here--not one! No goldfish died or even seemed sick The only variable is the addition of the ULTIMA 2000 filter to replace the pad filter and the higher temperatures--the PVC glue?? the "imbedded good bacteria" in the ULTIMA 2000?

I'm running the pump 24/7 until we figure out what happened, can you help me, please?

Hi Arnie,

Sorry you are having problems.You have correctly deduced the major reason for your die-off. The behavior being exhibited by your remaining koi is called "piping" and strongly suggests a small, very warm pond with essentially no dissolved oxygen. Add to that a new filter, which, despite the manufacturer's claims, is not going to give you *any* bioconversion for at least a month post-installation, and you've got (at onset) an overcrowded environment with no oxygen and high ammonia levels, as well as probable pH issues.

Did you do any water testing? What was your DO, ammonia, nitrite, pH, alkalinity?

Best advice for now:

1) Continue to run your new filter 24/7. Pressure-fed closed filters need constant flow and high dissolved oxygen concentrations for proper function. Cutoff of flow for more than 4 to 5 hours will kill off your bacterial cultures and leave you back where you started.

2) For now, keep your pond census low. Plan on about 50 gallons of water per inch of fish until your new filter wakes up.

3) Test your water frequently. Feed lightly. When nitrite starts to show up (as your ammonia drops), salt your pond to a concentration of 1.5 to 2 pounds per 100 gallons. Maintain this until your nitrites disappear, then wash down the salt to natural levels with water changes. This will prevent "brown blood disease" in your fish (the piscine equivalent of carbon monoxide poisoning in mammals).

4) Frequent large-volume water changes will help replenish dissolved oxygen, replace dissolved buffers and stabilize pH, and wash down ammonia and nitrite levels.

5) Find a way to maximize introduction of oxygen into your water. Airstones are NOT EFFECTIVE for this purpose. You need turbulence at the air/water interface. A spray-type fountain or very turbulent waterfalls and streams will do this well. Bioreactors and Bakki towers do it even better.

6) Once your new filter is awake and ammonia and nitrite are at zero, you may begin to introduce new fish ONE AT A TIME, allowing your filter bacteria to adjust to the increased load. Your pond, even with the new filter, is able to handle no more than 4 or 5 large fish, figuring with Steve Childers' estimate of 300 gallons per fish for sizes less than 12 inches and 500 gallons per fish for larger fish.

Hope this helps.

Bob

I just found your website last Friday and I can't stop reading! Thank you so much for the information - it's good to know I'm not the only one with some of these problems!!

My question is like so many others I read about - I am in my second year with my (around) 900 gallon pond and I had tons of string algae this March and tried winding it up like spaghetti as you suggested but got frustrated and ended up draining and refilling the whole pond. My Koi (4-8"?and goldfish (2-6"?) nearly died! Duh! Anyways it's apparent I have too much sun, ammonia, etc. I haven't read much about pond vacuums, do you suggest that I get one to suck out the stuff in the bottom of the pond that creates some of the ammonia and perform smaller water changes? I do not have a bottom drain at this time (I have a plastic liner), but apparently that would be a better route to go?

Thanks for your info!

Jackie

I think we need to clear up some misconceptions. The ammonia is coming from your fish, not the stuff on the bottom. The reason you have so much algae is that you have too many fish and not enough filter. Your fish are producing ammonia and excreting it via their gills. You do not have enough bioconverter capacity in your pond to get rid of it so the algae is doing you a favor and slurping it up. The payback is...more algae!

The "stuff on the bottom" produces hydrogen sulfide, very poisonous, and worse when disturbed in the spring. Your best bet with this is to get all your fish out into a holding tank, drain down your pond this spring and sump out all the sludge. Refill with fresh dechlorinated water, add a big, competent biofilter to your array with a UV to kill off floating algae, add back your fish and WAIT. Do not feed until water temps are consistently above 55 degrees, and then feed lightly, water testing frequently (every day at the beginning of the season) and changing water at least 10-20% every three days. Don't feed freely until your ammonia and nitrite levels are zero and stay there.

Water changes do more than dilute down ammonia. They get rid of dissolved organics and replenish essential minerals that maintain your pond's acid-base balance. (read "Who's on pHirst?" on the website).

Bob

Dr. Bob,

Just yesterday my wife and I notice several little babies swimming around in our pond. We have a 3400 gallon pond with 7 Koi - 8-10 inches / 4 Shubunkin and 2 comets. The babies are from a dark color to a transparent color with spots. Could our older Koi be mature enough to have babies? Either way we are mainly hobbyiest and have no harsh water conditions or problems with the pond but have a few questions.

What are the do's and don'ts to care for the new fish?

Can they live off the algae on the rocks?

Will the bigger Koi eat them?

We also have a bunch of plant life for them to hide, what percent survives and what is the growth rate?

Thank you,

Andy

Hi Andy!

How does it feel to be a koifather?

Koi mature enough to start spawning at about two years.

Your best bet as far as care for the sprats is to concentrate on maintaining great water quality and otherwise leave them alone. They'll do fine living off algae and debris in the nooks and crannies of the pond.

The larger koi will ignore them as soon as they are recognizable as "fish".

Depending on conditions and crowding, you can expect them to grow to about three to four inches in their first season. They can double or triple their size in the second year with optimal feeding and conditions.

Per cent survival varies. Once they are an inch log and free of predation, disease and poor water quality, 80-90 percent is reasonable.

Bob

A problem has developed that will require some attention. I have a formal pond located in the southwestern corner of Michigan. Its dimensions are 8' X 5' , one half approximately 18" deep and the other half being 36" deep. I have calculated the pond to be approximately 1200 gallons. Taking over the pond's upkeep 5 years ago, with the pond containing 6 koi, the situation changed drastically last summer.

The fish have been very slow growing, their nutrition is derived almost entirely from algae and organic matter that is already present in the water.

Last spring (2009) I noticed that there were many babies present. The largest koi in the pond when they spawned was no more than 6". Upon my first spring visit of the current year (2010), it is clear that easily 25 or more babies exist. They have achieved a size of 1/2" - 1" and for now the pond is a happy place. I am concerned that as they grow, overpopulation will become a major issue.

Any advice that will allow me to maintain the pond optimally would be appreciated. The pond has other problems like too much aquatic plant life and abundant green water, but for now this issue is most important.

Yup,

you are officially way overpopulated. As you said, for now, as long as the water is cold and the metabolisms are slowed way down, you are okay. Once things warm up, you got trouble. Your green water will get much worse as the ammonia that your fish churn out gets converted into algal biomass. The algae will generate oxygen during the day, but will suck it entirely out of the water as soon as the sun goes down. I didn't see any mention of filtration in your statement, and whatever filtration you have, if you are planning to keep the sprats, you are going to need a whole lot more.

Your options are these:

1) Find a new home for all but one or two of the sprats. Your local stream or other body of water is ILLEGAL! Koi are an introduced species, your local Interior and Wildlife reps will come down on you very hard indeed. Find and join a local koi club or water gardening club and see if any of the members are willing to adopt.

2) Do what koi breeders do. Cull. Sacrifice all but the one or two prettiest fish. A concentrated sodium bicarbonate solution is a humane way of doing this. Your only problem will be catching the little buggers. Upgrade your filters and add a UV system to deal with the algae.

3) Seriously upgrade your system. This means heavy upgrades in pumps and filters as well as tripling or quadrupling your volume. Childer's Law suggests about 100 gallons of water for each fish smaller than 8 inches and 300 gallons for each fish larger than 8 inches. Best suggested depth is 4 to 8 feet throughout, with 5 to 5.5 feet being an optimal compromise between volume and accessibility. Your filters and pumps will need to be able to process your entire pond volume in one hour.

Bob

Hi, Dr. Bob, I have about 900 to 1000 gallon pond with 4 Koi about 6 inches long. I was thinking of adding a few more fish but don't want to upset the ecosystem as everything seems to be fine right now.

How many fish can a pond my size comfortably hold?

Your capacity will depend on the size of your fish. For fish 8 inches or less, figure 50 gallons water PER INCH OF FISH. Bigger fish require 100 gallons per inch. You can exceed this with EXCELLENT filtration.

Steve Childers fudges this by advising a minimum of 500 gallons water per fish larger than 12 inches AND EXCELLENT filtration.

I hope that helps.

Bob

Hi
How are you? Great site!
I have three koi, about sixteen to eighteen inches long.They started out about six long, three years ago. Are there any tell tale sign's as to their gender?

Hope you can help.

Thank you.

Carl

At three years, koi are mature and can generally be sexed by their shape.

Males tend to be lean and torpedo-shaped, females tend to be broad in the beam, especially around the caudal area as they develop their egg mass.

Or, as my wife puts it during spawning season, "The girls are the ones in front!".

Bob

Hello Dr Bob,

Where in Florida do Koi live in the wild?

Koi are an introduced species and by definition are non-native. That being said, they are carp. Carp flourish in fresh water anywhere in the world, as the fisheries on our major rivers are sadly discovering. Koi have the evolutionary disadvantage of being inbred, brightly-colored carp and are more subject to predation than native species that are grey.

If you see a koi in a stream in Florida, it is a fish that somebody got tired of and "threw away".

Bob

I have a question from MPKS member Carol B. Her Koi fish have been changing colors the last couple of years and she wanted to know what she can do to help prevent this.

This year, she had a 1 year old fish that was White with 3 Orange spots. The fish lost all it's spots and is pure White now. She also had a 3 year old fish starting late last year into this year, changing from Black to Gray. Also early last year she had a 10 year old fish change from Orange, Black, and Red color to White and Black. She has been feeding them Tetra Pond Sticks. She doesn't have a problem with diseases and hasn't lost a fish in years. The water quality is good. The pond is in full sun and the water is clear. Any suggestion would be helpful.

Many koi are notorious for color changes. Kohakus (red/white) are known for having the red fade over time, and showas and sankes (red/black/white) can do the same. The rule of thumb is that red wil tend to be stable or fade and black will tend to increase as a koi ages. Factors such as food, fish genetics, sun exposure, water chemistry and stress will also affect color stability.

You may get some improvement by varying the food they get. Try minimizing the off-the-shelf, industrial-strength koi chow, and feed fresh vegetables (romaine lettuce, oranges, thawed peas, melon, etc.). Besides being a good source of vitamins and minerals, the dark leafy greens are chock-full of color precursors. A fresh, good-quality koi food will be expensive, but way worth the money. Kenzen is about the best stuff out there at present.

Bob

Hi, I hope you can help me, because I've been trying to figure out if this is feasible, and I'd really appreciate your input.

I live in Iowa City, Iowa, and I have a (somewhat) large pond in my backyard. It is roughly 220 feet by 100 feet. It is in the remains of an old limestone quarry, and is fed in the winter by an underground spring at one end. The water has an average depth of 3 feet, with a deepest point about 10 feet.

Our house sits on the edge of the quarry, and we often spend time on the deck looking down at the fish in the pond. There is a very healthy (some HUGE) carp that live in the pond, and while I know koi arent the same thing as grass carp, I can't help imagine how beautiful they would be in this pond. I'm just trying to figure out if you think it would be possible to put fish in this pond. I'm not looking for any prize winning koi, but I believe that some pond quality koi would look really nice.

I'm sorry to bother you, but I've been doing lots of internet research, and I just havent found anything like this. I dont know if its because its not really possible, or just that no one has tried anything like this. If you could let me know what you think, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you very much,

Shawn Sato

What you have there, by midwest backyard ponding standards, is a *gigantonormous* pond with built-in filtration. It is what us urban-dwelling techno-driven hobbyists cry ourselves to sleep over every night. Doing a rough calculation, you've got about 600,000 gallons in there. I'd be amazed if there were not multiple other native species of fish in there as well as the grass carp, simply on the basis of egg transport in on the feathers and feet of the waterfowl that must be visiting on a regular basis.

If the water is replenished in the winter by a spring, I suspect that it is fed year-round. As long as the outlet does not feed a natural waterway, what you have there is technically the same as any other backyard pond, just a little (gulp) bigger and older. It is an artificial construct, with carp already in it.

Given that grass carp are a much tougher organism than koi, (not having been inbred for two hundred years) koi should survive fairly well in your back yard, with a couple of cautions. First, don't expect to see much of them. Unless your quarry water is gin-clear (which I doubt), you won't see *any* fish unless it is right up under your deck. When small, koi are "hard-wired" with "evade and run" in their teeny-tiny brains, and will tend to stay near the deeper parts of the water.

Grass carp and native fish are the colors they are for a reason. Camoflage. Koi are best described as "targets" under these circumstances, and any fishing bird worth his feathers (kingfishers, cormorants, bald eagles, herons, egrets, sandhill cranes) and every raccoon in the county will be coming over for lunch pretty soon, with koi at the top of the menu, simply because they are easy to see. This problem will be worsened if you feed them off your deck with floating food, since the koi will recognize any disturbance at the water's surface as something to eat, and will become part of the Great Circle of Life very quickly as a result.

One other very important point to consider. Koi are an introduced, invasive species in this setting. What you want to do is actually ILLEGAL.

Given that even "garden center" koi run $25-$50 dollars apiece, I don't think that it's a wise use of funds.

Bob

Hi Candy!

Childer's Law suggests about 100 gallons of water for each fish smaller than 8 inches and 300 gallons for each fish larger than 8 inches. There are variations on this, but Steve, a talented koi keeper and Koi Judge, seems to have the most practical handle on this. The important things to remember are:

1) Koi are potentially the most wasteful fish out there from the standpoint of conversion of food=fish+waste. This gets worse as the fish get bigger.

2) Koi get bigger. Fast.

3) There is no such thing as "two or three koi". Chances are that one of them is female, one or more are male. A female can drop 50,000 eggs in a spawn. Even if less than 1% survive, that's still more koi than your pond can handle. WAY more.

4) Childer's Law can be "fudged" with high-quality, high-protein, liquid-fat-based koi food (i.e: Kenzen) and excellent filtration.

There's lots of other things to remember. The FAQs on our website have some of them. As we bring our Articles section online, more will become available.

Bob

Thanks for the info! You are right when you say there is no such thing as just a couple of Koi!!Any suggestions on what kind of plants to have in my pond. My Koi look at them as dessert!

Hi

I wonder if you could help me my pond froze quite deep and now I have 3 dead fish 2 are koi but it is still frozen

how should I get them out before they harm the other fish

Thank You

Hi Lynn,

What you do will depend on how thick the ice is and how deep the fish are. If the ice layer is a few inches at the top and the dead fish are in free water, you will need to melt a hole in the ice large enough to get a long-handled net through. Scoop them out. Multiple fish, multiple holes. The best way to do this is with hot water.

DO NOT TRY TO CHOP A HOLE IN THE ICE. The shock waves from the tool you use will damage the balance and vibration sensors on your remaining fish.

If you are frozen down to the bottom and the dead fish are encased in the ice, melt your way down to them and remove them.

I can't emphasize enough how important winter protection is to a backyard pond, especially a small or shallow one. Pond heaters (available in pet stores) are largely useless and often dangerous, since they tend to corrode and short out in the dead of winter, either blowing your fuses or electrocuting your fish. Or both.

The best solution is to cover the pond with a small greenhouse construction during the winter months. This not only keeps the temp above freezing (especially if you stick a small electric radiator in by the side of the pond under the plastic) but also prevents Ma Nature from distributing her winter bounty of snow, dead leaves, pollution, dirt, sticks and the occasional discarded couch into your pond. Look up "Versa-Quonset" on Google. They sell nice, affordable kits.

Bob

Hi Bob:

Been over a year since we conversed and I have a question for you.

Last year we wintered our koi outside and covered the pond with a greenhouse type frame. Water never froze but the pond was only 24" deep and we knew the koi would not stand a chance of surviving a Michigan winter.

We built a new pond which is almost 4' deep and decided to leave them go through the winter in their own pond. We did not cover it but put a bubble, an air stone and a pond de-icer in the pond. The pond has not frozen over until last week. We have been anywhere from several degrees below zero at night to 20 above during the day for about 8 days now. The pond is frozen over and there is a hole in the ice around the de-icer, the air stone is working as is the bubbler. I have seen all of my koi alive and appearing well as if 8 days ago.

My question, now that the pond has frozen over and the temperatures have remained so cold for a prolonged period, will my fish survive and what do I need to do if they do survive, the temperatures start to warm up and now even though they survived are going to stress and possibly get sick on me.

Your help would be appreciated and thanks again, Bob.

I'm a firm proponent of greenhouse covers for ponds in our area. Even without heated water, the fish just seem to do better under a plastic dome, and the water never freezes.

Bob Passovoy

Dr. Bob,

At the present time, I am maintaining many score (perhaps hundreds) of koi and comet-tails in seven (7) 300-gallon tubs. (Our 44,000- gallon outdoor pond is undergoing renovations by a pond service contractor who is taking much too long to complete the work.) I am hopeful that we can re-introduce the fish to the outdoor pond before much longer.

My question is: generally, what considerations should I observe if I undertake this re-introduction during winter? I am also concerned about the possibility of maintaining so many fish until the weather again warms up. The present water temperature in the tanks is 52-54 F; pH, ammonium, and nitrite levels are stabilized; outdoor water temperature is approximately 50 F and, of course, falling. Thank you for your help.

Don't do it. It is now too cold out for the fish to make the transfer successfully. Cool-down is always more stressful than warm-up, and doing it rapidly is likely to stress the fish beyond their tolerance. You are better off maintaining them as you are, and taking the opportunity to cull your population.

Bob Passovoy

Hello!
We have recently started up a new pond in Bellevue, IA. This is our second pond, however we relocated here from Vancouver, WA were the climate was much more mild.

Our new pond is 12 weeks old and I am fighting to get it balanced. I know it takes take time to balance a new pond. The pond is 10,000 gallons with a skimmer and pre- filter. We are running a 10,000 Aqua bio filter. In addition, we have a waterfall and an aeration system.

Here is where I need your help. The winters in the midwest... Do I spend the money to heat the water? inline heater? de-icers? It's all new to me. Or will they overwinter okay? I'm just sick to think that they might freeze. My pond is only four feet at the deepest part. Do I run the waterfall all winter or will it freeze solid. It was really cold here last year.

Help! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Darla

...and welcome to the wonderful Midwest. Do you realize that there is nothing between you and the North Pole to break the wind except moose, Minnesota, and a few disgruntled Canadians?

Midwestern winters are indeed rough, windy and unpredictable. How you get your pond through depends on how much money you are willing to spend. At four feet deep, you will not freeze to the bottom, but an Iowa winter will put four to five inches of ice over the top if you do not protect the pond and keep an area open for gas exchange. Trough heaters are not up to the job and frequently corrode and short out, risking your fish both from a water quality standpoint as well as electrocution and electrical injury. A high-capacity airstone set about six inches below water level and run as hard as you can will help, but we've had that system "dome over" and become ineffective during really cold spells.

A pond heating system is a marvelous luxury, and there are a number of them out there, but most of them require somewhere to place the heating coils so that the pond water can run over them (the KoiHeat system uses a heat exchanger, and does not require a tub for coils), and all of them are going to be increasingly expensive to run as the price of natural gas and propane rises.

In any case, whether you choose to heat your pond or not, the key to successful overwintering is protection. My personal choice, no matter what else you do, is to cover your pond. The best solution for this is a "poly house", basically a hoop house like the ones you see pop up every spring in the parking lots of your local mega-mart and scattered over the grounds of your favorite garden center. These are available as kits from outfits like Midwest Trading in St. Charles, IL, and are easy to erect and strike. Once up, the plastic cover is held on by a spring-wire and channel arrangement that has proven windproof for us through sixteen Chicago winters and has not even flinched under seventeen inches of wet snow. We don't heat our water; instead, we shove a 30-dollar Home Despot oil-filled electric radiator in under the plastic on the verge of the pond, and that keeps the air temperature at about 38-40 degrees through the winter. The water never freezes, and the frogs and plants love it. We keep the filters running all winter. The bacteria go dormant and pop right back up in the spring.

Covering your pond not only gives you that greenhouse effect, it also keeps fall and winter debris out of the pond, improving your water quality and lessening the need for cleanout in the spring. It minimizes temperature swings, especially with heavy snowfalls when the water is not frozen over.

Don't be tempted to cobble something together from PVC pipe. It is too light to stand up to the winds you are likely to get, and PVC becomes very brittle at freezing temperatures. A good load of snow will shatter your framework, dump the snow wholesale into your pond, and kill your fish via thermal shock. Nothing works better than inch-and-a-quarter galvanized steel pipe. Really.

If you choose not to cover the pond (Arrrghh!), running your filters and falls can be dangerous. Water is capricious, and freezes...oddly. You can build up ice dams in your flow system that will divert your water out into your yard, leaving you with a hole in the ground filled with crud and fish-sickles. Even if your pond is covered, a water circulation route that bypasses your falls and streams and dumps directly into the pond is a good idea.

Cover that pond, Darla, you will never regret it!

Bob

I am experiencing a lot of algae in my pond. this has never really happened before, but i cant believe the growth especially in march. the pond is about 900 gallons and is only about 32 inches in depth, there are only exotic gold fish and regular gold fish in the pond, i have not started up the pump or anything as of yet, just shut everything down for the winter. the algae is growing mostly around the sides of the pond and a little on the bottom, i have scrapped off as much as i possibly can, what can i do to prevent this, this is only march, i thought algae blooms were a problem in the summer months. thank in advance

Hi Steve,

The hair algae you are describing is serving a purpose over the winter. It is sopping up the ammonia produced by your fish and providing a vegetarian salad for them to munch on. Leave it alone until you get your pumps and filters up and running. At that point, remove the longest strands with a biff brush on a stick. Don't bother scrubbing or pressure washing the liner. Your biofilters will reduce the ambient ammonia to zero and the algae will go semi-dormant, to the point where the fish will keep it under control.

Algae requires sunlight, phosphates and ammonia to thrive. Deny it the ammonia and it will not grow. Filtration is key.

Bob

I recently installed a 1200 gal pond with a 20 ft stream. Right after I started the stream all the stones in it turned a dark brown color. I used an algae killer and all brown stuff disappeared from the stream.

Ever since then (about one month) the water in my pond has been an ice tea color.

I have a skimmer with a filter and a waterfall filter system in the pond. The filters pick up a lot of stuff but the water stays ice tea color. What can I do to make the water clear?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

Howdy,

Well, what started all this was the algaecide. You killed off the early growth of a hair algae that was going to be beneficial for your pond's ecology. The organic debris left after you used the plant poison is still dissolved in your water and is responsible for the discoloration.

You can reduce the discoloration with multiple water changes and by adding a protein extractor to your filter array. You can minimize the problem almost completely by avoiding the use of algaecides entirely. Your pond is supposed to be a natural environment. Algae are all natural, and will help soak up ammonia in the winter when your filter bacteria are sleeping.

Bob

Hi!

Is there something natural (possibly something in my home) that I can use to kill algae in my pond that won't harm my fish or frogs?

Thanks

Hi there,

What kind of algae? Hair algae or microscopic (green water) algae?

Regardless of the type of algae you are struggling with, its presence in this part of the season strongly suggests that you have too many fish, not enough filter, or both. Algal growth depends on three things, sun, heat and nutrient. You can't do anything about the sun, unless you can shade your pond, which will help a little. In this climate, we love heat. No help there. Nutrient levels are where you can fix things.

Algae eat ammonia, which is the major waste product excreted by your fish when you feed them. The more fish and food, the more ammonia and the more algae you will have. To correct this, you need to [a] stop feeding, [b] get rid of a bunch of your fish or [c] seriously upgrade your biofiltration so there is no available ammonia for it to eat. Those are the only "natural" solutions.

Algaecides are a bad idea. They'll kill the algae sure enough, but will leave you with a ton of brown organic sludge that you'll only be able to get rid of with a series of near-total water changes.

An Ultra-Violet sterilizer will remove microscopic algae without harming your pond's ecological balance, but will not touch hair algae. If hair algae is your problem, your best solution is a rake or brush on a stick, and seriously upgraded filtration. Be careful, though. If you remove all the hair algae, you'll be destroying a good portion of what ammonia-removal you presently have.

Happy ponding!

Bob

Dear Bob

I found your site just browsing the web and its been a great help. My dilemma is our pond has no filtration and we have a bad pea soup algae problem what is the best king of filter to get that will help control pea soup algae in ¾ sun.

Angie,

The website has a lot of information on algae control. The most important thing you can do is to reduce the nutrient load. Algae lives on sunlight, warmth and nutrient, primarily ammonia, produced by your fish. No amount of water changing will change this. Algaecides will simply pollute your water with added chemicals and the organic crud left as the algae dies. NOT recommended.

You need to install and maintain enough biofiltration to reduce your ammonia levels to ZERO. No free ammonia, no algae. Simple. Any high-capacity biofilter will work. Ultra-violet sterilizers will help, but will be ineffective without biofiltration.

Keep reading.

Bob

Subject: Need to eliminate "Green Water"

Also, I am entering week 2 of the new pond and water and I am green already. Any recommendations on seeding the bio media and bacteria addition is welcome. Current fish population 2 koi and 15 shubunkin.

What you got there is "New Pond Syndrome". Your filters are not mature enough to take care of the full ammonia output of the fish you have and the floating algae is taking advantage of the sun, the warm temperatures and the ammonia and just going wild.

Algae thrive on all three, and nutrient load (ammonia) is the only one you can directly affect. If you continue to keep koi, you'll find that the biofalls-based filter is far too small to keep up. You'll need to add an external filter and will need to wait at least six weeks for it to come up to speed enough to reduce your nutrient (ammonia) levels enough to starve out the algae. The whole setup will actually take a couple of years to mature fully.

As far as UV units go, pick a unit that is robust (as in: NOT PLASTIC!), has a high-intensity UV bulb that is easy to change (you'll be changing it out every season), and that does not impede your water flows. BIG (at least 2-inch ports, stainless steel construction and 80 watts of UV power are recommended. Be sure that the UV is the LAST thing your water sees as it leaves the filter. It won't work anywhere as well as it should on water that has not been at least mechanically filtered first. Submersible UV fails the ease-of-service test. Comprehensively. Remember that you're going to be changing that bulb in early spring. That's fun only for Polar Bear Club members and other masochists.

Bob

HOPE YOU CAN HELP !

This year we put in a new pond, I can't get rid of the green water, it measures about 15 x15 and steps down 2 steps, the center is 30 inches deep. I believe it is around 1,500 gal. it has a 5 foot waterfall, a 4,000 gph pump in the skimmer and 3 - 2 inch 24 x 24 inch filters and a sack of bioballs on the top.

It is in full sun around 9 hours a day and has 7 water lilies 12 oxygenators and 4 other plants. When we first put the pond in it had 7 koi fish and the water was clear with green rocks on the bottom looked great, then we got 20 more koi 3 days later the water started turning green now we can only see down 3 " MAYBE. The sides and bottom of the pond are covered with pea gravel and a few other larger rocks.

From the start I added microbe lift pl and barley liquid that I made at home 'I put the barley in a 5 LB bucket with water , set it in the sun and I add about 1/2 gal 2 x a week.. I have been told I have to many fish, there is not enough filters ' need 6 more filters' , Take my plants out of the pots, ' There planted in pots with clay and pea gravel on the top. The largest koi is 10 inches long 8 others are 7 inches and the rest are around 6'' long. The last 2 weeks I have done 2 partial 30 % water changes each week, does help a little I hate to do that all the time, my water bill will get to looking ugly. I feed the fish 2 x a day a total of about 1/2 cup of food each x .

Please help I cant sleep at night trying to figure this one out.

Thanks marty

for starters, you should have stayed with the 7 fish. You are now severely overstocked in an immature pond with a biofilter array that has not fully matured, with fish that are generating more ammonia than your filters can handle.

Barley straw extract will not help you, since the inhibitory capacity of barley straw works on hair algae only, and is a result of a synergy of pond chemistry and a strain of bacteria found on the straw. Unfortunately, it leaves a root-beer colored stain in the water.

Your problem centers around ammonia, phosphates and sunlight. Microscopic floating algae love these, and will explode in a pond with high levels of all three.

Please resist the temptation to go out and buy chemical algaecides. Not only do they not work, but they end up killing all your other plants and leave a huge organic load in the pond. This will leave sludge in your rocks (which I personally dislike intensely) and foster the growth of fish-killing parasites.

I would suggest:

1) Get rid of two-thirds of your fish. 1500 gallons with that filter array will not support 27 koi.

2) Upgrade your filtration. Big-time.

3) Leave your plants alone. They are neither the problem nor (at this time) the solution.

4) If anyone tries to sell you a chemical algae treatment, punch them in the mouth.

5) Install a good quality, high-flow, high-intensity Ultraviolet unit into your system *after* the last filter. Make sure it is constructed of materials that do not deteriorate with UV exposure. It should also have inlet and outlet ports the same size as your pipe runs. The UV will sterilize the algae that flows through it, and your water will gradually clear as you run the system and do small water changes.

Bob

Hi Dr Bob,

I have a 4000 gallon 12 by 14, 4-5 foot deep pond. There are about (12) 1 and 2 year old koi in the pond. I use a skimmer and waterfall filtration system with a bottom drain, although my pump is in the skimmer. I also have a 36 inch UV filter, not it makes a difference for this question. During this winter I have been using an aerator, and a 300 watt deicer to keep the fish alive. Now for the actual question,

When should I start up the pump ? Should I clean the bottom first ? Should I do a couple of water changes?

Hi Tom!

1) Start up the pump when you are fairly sure the air temp will stay above freezing all night and all the ice is gone from the pond's surface.

2) Definitely clean off the bottom, but not until the water has had a chance to circulate and aerate for a few days. Do the cleanup in small increments, especially if there is a lot of debris on the bottom.There are almost certain to be pockets of hydrogen sulfide gas down there and you want to minimize your fish's exposure to this poison. A pond vac will help.

3) Water changes are always a good idea. You should have been doing them all winter!

Bob

What do you recommend is the time to REALLY start up the filter system for our area?

Should you just go by water temperature alone? I know water is warmer on the bottom and I am afraid to start up the filtration too soon. OK, what about the outside temperature factor - snow is still looming in the forecast.

Please advise your wisdom is always greatly sought
after.

Sincerely,

Just another happy
ponder!

The whole business of stratification is probably non-existent when applied to backyard ponds. You need to be a lot deeper to develop a thermocline. If your pond has been covered through the winter months, with a little heat added, I'd be running my pumps year-round. Under those conditions, the biofilter bacteria are dormant but not dead and will start up very quickly, often fast enough to completely avoid the dreaded Spring Nitrite Spike. If you've been open to the weather in full shutdown, I'd do a bottom cleanout first, as soon as you are reasonably sure the last of the truly freezing weather is past. Startup at that point will do everything good.

Bob

Hi Bob

This is Barry who you met last Friday at your MPKS meet at The Oaks. Further to revealing our ignorance at managing koi, assuming the flooding yesterday was a good thing for melting ice etc, we find ourselves with about a dozen still going strong, including a couple of tiddlers so i think the 2 koi we lost must have been down to the extreme cold here in Naperville.

Now, however, you may recall our pond was never shut down by previous owners before we moved in January. I looked at a relatively clear pond for the first time yesterday but after the massive rain, today i notice 2 things:

1. the pond is very high although not in danger of overflowing - is there any dilution that i must immediately address due to the heavy rain? Should i test for ammonia levels?

2 (and of immediate concern) i can't see a THING in the pond today - i'm guessing the heavy rain stirred up all the sludge and muck on the bottom (i'm guessing from a measure in the ice hole that it's only 18 inches deep all around (5*6 pond, 400 gallons about) but i was hoping it would settle by lunchtime and it hasn't. It's pea green soup murky so i don't know if i should just leave it, rescue (harm?) the fish out of the pond or what?

please advise - thanks so much

In answer to your questions.

1) Rain is generally free water, that is, water without dissolved minerals (except for whatever pollutants it picked up on the way down!). While ammonia is always worth checking, especially given your very heavy stocking overload, a more critical value would be your alkalinity and then your pH. You will not have nitrite yet; no active bacterial activity. If your alkalinity is less than 80 ppm, it needs to be supplemented with sodium bicarb. Watch out though. If your pH is low and you have ANY ammonia in the water (as I suspect you do, given question 2) you'll need to pre-treat with Amquel or ClorAm-X BEFORE correcting the alkalinity. Even with the protection conferred by the cold water, the conversion of ionized to unionized ammonia caused by the increase in pH will be enough to kill all your fish at once.

2) What you got there, son, is a good old-fashioned Midwestern algae bloom. It is the combination of a little sun, a little phosphate and carbonate, and a whole lot of ammonia. What triggered the bloom was the warmup caused by the relatively warm rain. DO NOT ADD ALGAE KILLERS! You will poison the pond with herbicide, and, like salt, once that crap and the sludge from the dead algae are in your pond, they are there for good or until you remove them with water changes. Dilute the green with 20% water changes (dechlorinated first!) twice a week.

Bob

Thanks Bob - very helpful and precise info. I'm guessing by 'very heavy stocking overload' you mean we have too many fish in the pond for its size. Can you confirm i'm understanding you correctly.

We bought 'Prime' which appears to be the same gunk as ClorAm-X so will use to pre-treat whole pond if the alkalinity proves to be too low. Also, will do this before adding any sodium bicarb if it's required. Is it safe to pre-treat for ammonia in morning and then raise alkalinity in afternoon or should one wait a day or two between exercises.

Regarding pea soup, i think we should get going on 20% water changes like you advise. I'm assuming just remove 20% murky water, then simply add hose water which has been treated with the appropriate amount of Prime, right?

I called the 'fish doctor' and she suggested gettting someone out to remove ground sludge asap. I prefer to wait till we do a total water change once temps are consistently above 50 so we can start feeding fish with a freshly cleaned out pond. ie take your advice till spring, then do a clean out and not 'deal' with the sludge at the bottom till then.

Carelys (wife) - i'll head to fish shop after collecting kids to test a sample of water.

thanks Dr Bob - this really helped us.

Correct. Too many fish, not enough water.

Check for ammonia and pH. Then alkalinity. Do not treat for anything unless you know what you are treating. If you have any ammonia in the presence of a low pH, correcting the pH will deionize the ammonia and kill your fish. Always treat ammonia first.

You will need to clear out the sludge, but you'll need to get all your fish out of the pond first and into an isolation tank. Then you drain the pond fully and slurp out the gunk. Disturbing the sludge now can release pockets of hydrogen sulfide-rich sediments which will - that's right - kill your fish. Moving your fish now will stress them. Leave everything as it is except for the water changes and wait for your water temps to hit 60. Then go ahead with the cleanout. Do not power wash or rinse with hose water. Rinse down the sides with a sump pump and relatively clean water from your partially drained pond. Then sump out the pond and discard. Pretreat the pond with Stress-X (no more ammonia, so the "Prime" isn't necessary, refill and reintroduce your fish.

Bob

Subject: Re: First Koi Experience

Hi Bob, Quick question again, Gretchen and I are both working this evening and can't make the dinner (believe me we would!). So... I changed about 50% of the water on Sunday , added a bit of salt, and we let the pond go. Filter still running, believing we had no fish. Cup of coffee this morning and up comes one. Appears to be ok, what of this secondary population of bacteria? Water is a little green/brown. I am not planning on doing anything other than testing for nitrite tomorrow, maybe adding a little salt if needed and letting it go to see what happens... Any advice, timeline for anything else? Sorry for all the questions , but I was quite surprised..... Thanx! Philip

Nitrification is the process by which several different populations of naturally occurring bacteria in your pond convert ammonia produced by your fish to nitrite, then on to non-toxic nitrate in a second step. The first population of these bacteria develops in early spring and will generally be up and running about 3 weeks after the water temperatures are reliably and consistently above 50 degrees. The populations that convert the VERY toxic nitrite to relatively non-toxic nitrate develop more slowly and will generally take two to three weeks longer. As your pond matures, a process that can take between two to five years, the spring reawakening process shortens somewhat.

Pond products that purport to contain filter cultures to "jump-start" your filters do not, in fact, work. Such cultures can be obtained from specialty labs, but they have a shelf life of about 12 hours and are generally used by large aquariums (i.e.: Shedd) to prepare habitats for large populations of newly acquired fish rapidly. These starter cultures cost the Earth, and the labs won't deal with you unless you are a commercial, museum or research enterprise.

Bob

I have kept my koi inside for the winter. How do I:

• get their immune systems up before reintroduction to the pond?
• get the PH level similar to the pond?
• get the pond as good for them as it can be - reduce "nasties"
• get good bacteria going?

Do I put in one or two at a time, then a couple more? (There are 2 koi who stayed in the pond over winter).

1) If your indoor koi are swimming around in 65 - 70 degree water, their immune systems are just fine and functioning at 100% efficiency. Good food with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetable supplements will set them up great. Don't even think about reintroducing them to your pond until the outdoor water temperatures are reliably above 55 degrees, and preferably 60.

2) Don't sweat the pH. If your water source for indoor and outdoor is the same, the pH will be the same. You'll want to do a full test run before introduction of your fish, with temp, pH, ammonia, nitrite, chlorine, chloramine, and alkalinity at a minimum.  Remember that your outside fish are not the only things that are dormant. Your filter bacteria are also offline, and won't be able to keep up with the load if you dump all of your fully awake and hungry indoor fish into the pond all at once.

The best thing you can do to get the pond ready is to make sure it is as clean as possible and that your biofilters are up and running. You'll want to introduce you indoor fish back to the pond gradually, in ones and twos over several weeks, watching ammonia, alkalinity, nitrite and pH carefully.

Give your filter bacteria time to adjust to the load of warm, hungry fish. Remember that biological systems have considerable inertia. Also, remember not to transfer your fish until your indoor and outdoor water temperatures are within 10 degrees of each other. The wider that gap is, the longer you'll need to float your fish before releasing them into the pond. One or two degrees isn't a big deal. Five or ten degrees is, and if the change from warm to cold is sudden, it'll kill your fish.

Bob

I recently cleaned out a 3 tier pond in my back yard and after much work and testing started to incorporate the fish into the pond. The fish were doing well, healthwise and were starting to eat regularly when i came home one day to find the largest 3 missing, presumably cause the smaller where able to hide in the side rocks.

I assumed it was a heron or cat because it happened during the day. I also thought that the depth might have something to do with it because a leak had dropped the pond to at most 18". I proceeded to fill the pond to a depth of 24" + and added some larger koi who were at most 4" and built a center shelter with 3 rocks to create a overhead hiding spot.

Within 5 minutes two mallards, a male and female, proceeded to eat the largest new koi as i watched in amazement, i did not see her take it but watched and ran to get rid of them with only the fileted fish left on the side. After searching the internet I found more instances of mallards not being a fish eating predator than those that said they were????...therefore, i made a the rock area in the middle more of a fort with a way in and out big enough to let the fish in and a large enough area to hold all the fish. In addition i ran fishing line across the pond in hopes of deterring them.

Not sure at this point if this is going to work but hoping it will. I realize that if the koi were larger this probably wouldn't be a problem but i can't afford larger ones and would really like to raise the ones I have rather than buying ones that someone else has raised.

The Question: Is there anything else i can do short of shooting the ducks ( I do have a 12 guage lol) but I realize ILLEGAL. Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Chad

Hi Chad,

Ducks are a problem, but thankfully less of one than herons. Your major problem is your depth. At two feet, it is perfect feeding depth for every predator in the neighborhood. Going deeper (four to five feet) would eliminate herons and raccoons. Ducks have the unfortunate ability to float and have no problems with water landings. Loud noises, paintball guns and high-pressure water sprays via an automated spray device (ScareCrow) have all worked for various members of our club. Small, yappy/hysterical dogs with no fear of water are good, too, but then you have to put up with the dog.

The best thing about ducks (aside from being delicious) is that they can be discouraged. Irritate them enough when they show up and they will eventually stay away. This time of year, the pairs are looking for nesting sites. The appearance of constant threat to nestlings will chase them off.

Bob

Dear Bob,

I have a pond 55' x 32' and 8" to 48" deep. This is my pond's second year with fish.

This morning I found one of my sixteen Koi dead floating in the shallow end of my pond. Looking over the fish, I did not see any signs of disease but did observe a small hole located in the top of its head. The puncture size of the hole was that of a small flathead screw driver or about a quarter of an inch.

Is it possible I received a visit from a Heron recently or is there something wrong with my pond's environment?

Thank You,

Ron

If you live where we do, it's a little early for herons, but if your pond is below the Mason-Dixon Line, predation is very likely.

The fact that there is only one fish dead and there's a definite sign of trauma reinforces this. If you had a water quality or disease issue, you'd have multiple fish dead or sick.

Bob

Bob,

Do you have , or know of anyone in our club that has, experience using flexible PVC? I bought 50 feet of 2” flexible PVC pond tubing because (according to a couple of websites) it was suppose to be easy to connect and glue to PVC fittings. Well, I found that it doesn’t fit PVC fittings. So I called the company I ordered it from and the guy told me that fittings that you buy from the local hardware store will not fit.

So I ordered schedule 40 PVC fittings that were made for flexible PVC tubing and they don’t fit either. The PVC tubing is still slightly too large. Since it doesn’t fit inside the PVC fittings, I don’t know if PVC glue will bond the tubing to PVC fittings Did I fall victim to a marketing scam? Do you think I can make it work by sanding down the tubing and fittings until the tubing fits inside the fitting? I’d appreciate any suggestions.

Hi Bob,

Large portions of my 19-year-old pond's tubing is 2" flex, and I've never had problems with the fittings, which I generally buy cheap from Menard's. You will need to prep both the fittings and the pipe with primer, and the glue for flex PVC is also different. It acts as a lubricant when applied and you need to hold it still for much longer to set the bond. Standard PVC glue will pop right off. It does not have the punch to dissolve the outer layer of PVC on the flex pipe. If you let go of the joint too soon, even with the flex glue, you can watch the fitting creep right off.

The "schedule" rating denotes what contents the pipes are rated to carry. Schedule 40 is rated for water only. Schedule 80 is more robust, gray in color and rated to be safe for some chemical applications. It is also way more expensive.

Get yourself some of the right glue, some standard fittings and (unless this guy sold you a pipe with a non-standard external diameter and you were scammed) playing with the scraps should get you the technique.

Bob

Hi Bob,

How are you? I haven't been to the meeting of late - no excuses! 🙂

I wonder how you prevent freezing the water left over in the pipe from the bottom drain to your filter system in the garage. I use a knife-valve that's buried in the ground next to the pond. I've never been able to completely shut it off and so the underground vortex always has water through the winter (that freezes).

We're moving across town in Palatine and I'm designing my pond at the new house. I remember you have your filtration system all neat in the garage but wonder how you shut off the water from the pond in the winter. I'm contemplating a system all above ground (instead of having the gravity fed pre-filter buried in the ground).

p.s. - I plan on moving my 1500 gallon preformed W Lim pond. I am intimidated by the task of maintaining a liner pond with a higher likelihood of punctures.

Thanks,

Yuan

Yuan,

The best way to keep the lines open is to keep the water flowing. Second-best would be to buy the highest quality gate valves you can for that one application and install an air valve between them. When you want to shut things down, close off the gate valve and pump air into the lines. The pipes do not have to be completely dry, just empty enough so the residual water has enough room to expand without bursting the pipes.

I generally do not shut my system down. The cover keeps things warm enough to allow year-round running.

Liners are tough and will not leak if due care is taken during construction.

Bob

Dr. Bob,

I took your advice and bought a bunch of the product you informed me to purchase. I have 2 more questions, my last pond I used flag stone and was not to happy with it, what is a good rock to utilize inside and outside the pond (oval in shape - boulder type I prefer)?

Also will a UV sterilizer kill beneficial bacteria?

1) The stuff most folks like is Wisconsin "cobble rock" which is basically glacier-polished granite. As you might guess, it comes in a wide variety of colors and sizes, is relatively cheap and stacks well as long as you put the big ones on the bottom. It tends to be very stable.

2) UV units perform only one function reliably: they prevent microscopic floating algae from reproducing, thus preventing "pea-soup" ponds. The filtering bacteria you are worrying about are sessile. They adhere to rocks, filter media and the insides of your pipes. They never see the inside of your UV. There is some evidence that high-intensity UV will kill some free-swimming parasites, but since most parasites are stuck to your fish and it's kinda hard to get the fish to swim into the UV unit...

Bob

I'm currently upgrading my pond from a 700 gallon pond to a 1700 gallon pond. For this new pond I was able to purchase a Savio Waste Master 2050 pump and a Compact Savio Filter at a good price brand new. I was told this would be sufficient for this appx size. I'll be running appx 17 feet of flexible hose to the biofalls. The biofalls will be no more then 2 feet higher then the skimmer. My current biofalls is an Atlantic BF1000, not sure if I'll need to get a bigger Biofalls. If so, any suggestions?

Since I'm only 2 years in to this hobby and this will be the last pond I make, I wanted to make sure everything is more than adequate for handling this pond. Currently we have 4 small Koi and 2 shubunkins which I know will get bigger this year.

Please let me know your thoughts, every Koi pond retail shop has given me different answers and I don't want to redo anything.

Thanks for your
time,

Andy

I applaud you intention to make this pond your last, but knowing this hobby, I'm willing to bet that you'll be digging again in a few years.

1700 gallons is small, and all you need to be concerned about is that your pump, filter and falls box are capable of handling flows sufficient to exchange all 1700 gallons through your filter in one hour.

Your piping should be as big as you can afford, with a minimum diameter of two inches. Remember that you will lose flow volume with every foot of pipe your water runs through, and more with every corner it turns. Every inch your water has to be lifted also loses you flow. Your pump should come with a graph detailing flow rates at various elevations above pond level. Our website has links to graphs (see Pipe Run Tables) that allow you to calculate the flow loss per foot of pipe and per fitting. Use them before you start your build. You may find that you'll need to modify your design.

Bob

Indoors, predators will not be a problem. This eliminates the need for nets, fishline, ScareCrows, caltrops and anti-aircraft emplacements.

Hi. I live in Houston, Tx and wanted to build koi pond with concrete and someone mentioned that concrete is bad for fish. Is that true? If it is, what do you recommend? Thank you.

Concrete isn't bad at all, just cranky and expensive. In order to hold up to the mass of water and the force it exerts, a concrete pond must be a ferrocrete or steel-reinforced structure. Construction requires professionals expert in the trade to avoid leaks, and those gentlemen are very aware of the value of their skills. Concrete is an unforgiving medium to model in, and once set, modification requires a jackhammer. Water feeds, drains and skimmer positions have to be thought of and designed in *first* and can't be easily removed or modified once the pour is over.

Once dug, constructed and poured, it must cure, and then be washed down with muriatic acid. It takes weeks for the surface limestone to leach enough of the alkali out of the walls to allow the pH to stabilize enough to allow you to begin to introduce fish. If it leaks, repairs are difficult. If you live in a part of the country prone to earthquakes, even a small temblor can crack and ruin your construct entirely.

Most of the hobbyists I know have opted for liner-based ponds. The two guys with more grandiose ideas who went for concrete had endless trouble which was funny only in retrospect, years later.

Once established and stable, they are durable, but most ponders tend to regard their ponds in the same light that model railroaders consider their layouts. Neither is ever finished. A liner pond has only to be drained and the old liner pulled up to prepare for expansion. Concrete must be blasted.

If the hobby interests you and if you are a beginner (especially if you are a beginner!) avoid concrete. Liner is much cheaper, quicker and more forgiving.

 Bob

Bob

After getting quotes on a pondless waterfall installation, my wife and i decided to install one ourselves. The problem now is that I've got leaks springing up along my streambeds. It was reccomended that I use Great Stuff! foam sealant between the rocks. It is now looking like I have more foam than rocks. Any advice on products to use to seal between the rocks?

Great Stuff is not waterproof! It will divert water but will not form a seal. Your problem is with your liner in the stream bed. If you were careless or too hasty with the liner joins ( not enough sealer, or not enough overlap or not enough cure time), your joins will leak like seives. You may not have allowed enough extra width at stream's edge to accommodate splash and turbulence, or your streams may simply be too shallow for your flows. Look at the back of your falls reservoir. If your flows are too high for your falls outlet, you could be losing water from the back of the falls.

Did you carefully place the rock into your stream bed, or did you just drop it in? Depending on what kind of liner the kit supplied, it is entirely possible that a jagged edge of a rock has perforated your liner. The lightweight liners supplied in the kits are often undersized, very fragile, and prone to these types of leaks. 44 mil EPDM butyl rubber remains the best and most cost-effective material available.

Rip out the Great Stuff, then get the rocks out. Look for the damp spots under the liner. The leak will be obvious.

Bob

Our pump is no longer working and needs to be sent back to dealer for a warranty replacement. How long will my Koi and goldfish survive without the pump circulating the water?

The pond is about 800 gallons with a waterfall that the pump normally runs. We only have 5 fish in the pond now. The dealer says it might be 10 days before we get a new pump.

Thanks for the help,

Tim

Hi Tim,

Your filter is essentially dead 24 hours after flow stops. You can keep things going with daily 50% water changes and NO FEEDING. Remember to pretreat for chlorine and chloramine.

Your filter will need about three to four weeks to come back online once flow is restored.

Best advice...buy a new pump now and avoid manufacturers that won't back up their equipment properly and promptly. When it finally comes back, keep the old pump as a reserve.

Bob

This past Fall I had a deeper pond dug and kept it full over the winter. I had a bubbler pump going 24/7 to stop the ice from forming completely over the pond. I am noticing what appears to be string algae on the rocks where I did not have any last Fall. I have heard that nitrites from the snow will cause algae to "bloom". Do I have to do anything "special" to avoid green water or will the natural process of getting the biofalls going again and natural growth of my pond plants take care of controlling algae in the "pond season" months?

I have never had algae problems in the past years - algae on the rocks but nothing major enough to change the water color.

The rule of thumb for larger koi ponds (10000 gallons and up) is enough pump flow to put about 1/2 to 3/4 of your water through your filters every hour. Smaller ponds require higher throughput, that is, every molecule of water in your system exposed to the filter media once an hour.

Remember that what the pump's label advertises is not what you are putting through the system. Every foot of elevation above grade added to every foot of pipe and every turn your piping makes adds to your head loss and decreases your flow. Our website's home page has a series of links to tables that will help you calculate how much flow you are losing from these sources of resistance. It should help you upgrade your system.

Please note that your problems with algae and debris are not  your pump's fault. Algae is the product of sunlight, temperature, ammonia and phosphate. You will reduce the algae load some by improving your filter throughput and reducing your ammonia load. You may want to set up a whole new filter system in parallel to your existing setup to increase your pond's bioconversion efficiency. Floating (microscopic) algae can be controlled with UV. Hair (or string) algae is best handled with nutrient and sun restriction and control of ammonia. Excess algae can be removed with a toilet brush on a broomstick. Avoid algaecides.

The debris problem has many sources. Outside debris can be partially cleared with a skimmer setup. Large suspended solids require a pre-filter or a vortex. Bottom debris resolves with removal of all that rock on the bottom of your pond and installation of a bottom drain.

Ponding is fun. There's always another challenge.

Bob

Hi Bob,

First of all I have read and have learned a lot from this Q and A session, one of which I learned from reading on here is I think my Bio Bead filter screen inside is plugged with the beads because my water color has deteriorated quite a bit, going to take it down next month when fish are not eating so much. My questions are as follows, I want to thank you in advance for such an informative site.

#1 I live in Las Vegas ,NV so not bad winters but 115 degree days in summer, I have right now an Aquadyne 60B Bio Bead filter a 40 watt UV and an external pump that is rated for 2900 GPH,my pond is an Oval shape 12' x 9" x 2.5 feet deep, I have 5 large Koi and one Goldfish, I am going to expand my pond to 12' x21' x 4' deep, should I use two 3" drains or would one 4" be enough?

#2 I know my pump will not be big enough and was wondering if I made my own settlement tank out of a 55 gallon plastic drum and a bio filter out of another, would that be enough filtration and what would be the best way to make them, my pond also has a water fall, where in the system would I install my pump, can I use my existing pump and get another pump as well or just go with one bigger pump that will handle my pond.

#3 UV...I have a 40 watt UV plastic type is it big enough, does all my water have to go through the UV? Thanks for your help.

In order of asking.

1) If your flow rates through your filter are still good and you are not having problems backflushing, your beads are not the problem, nor is the screen. Water discoloration is usually dissolved organics, which bead filters can't do anything about. You need either massive water changes or an efficient protein extractor. If you've been using algaecides or barley straw, stop. That's the root of your problem. Decaying plant material contains phytocyanins; yellow-brown proteinaceous pigments which will stain your water and cause it to foam. Once in your water, it will stay there unless bubbled off or replaced with clean water.

2)You'll be going from about 2000 gallons to 7500. How many bottom drains you'll need will depend on the shape and design of the pond. If it is going to be longer than it is wide, two drains seems to be a good idea. Look hard at the design, figure out where the water flows are likely to be going and how much water you need to move through the pipes, and decide based on that. Your contractor should (if he's any good at all at this and not just some doofus with a backhoe) be able to advise you. Don't forget to add a skimmer to the array.

3) I can guarantee you that 55 gallon drums will not be adequate. You will need to move between 6000 and 7500 gallons of water through your filters every hour to maintain your water quality. Your pumps will need to deliver this with resistance from pipe runs and bends taken into account, and your prefilters and filters will need to be big enough to handle the flow without either overflowing or allowing the water too little time in the filter to get the ammonia and nitrite broken down. You can run a pond that size with home-built 55 gallon drum filters, but you'll need several of them set up in parallel array. There are a number of good articles on this subject on the website.

4) Your 40-watt plastic job will fail. Look at Aqua-UV's products and opt for a high-intensity UV unit with inlet and outlet ports the same size as your filter piping. Any UV system should be set up with a diverter pipe to allow some of the flow to bypass the unit, since most UV systems have a series of right angles built into the flow to slow flow through the unit and maximize exposure time to the UV radiation. This can severely limit your flows through your system if you insist that all your water needs to see the UV every time it goes through the filters. It's actually not necessary. Remember that UV is only effective for prevention of microscopic "green water" algae. Hair algae is a whole other issue and your UV will be no help at all, at all.

Have fun with the new pond. You and your fish will love it!

Bob Passovoy

Bob,

We have enjoyed your many tips and advice through your web site. We hope that you can help us with a decision on purhasing a UV sterilizer.

We have a 4year old 2,000 gal pond with bottom drain, skimmer, 3600 gal per hour pump, large water fall, eleven 3 year old Koi, and really green brown water. We live in Aurora and our PH runs high 8-9. We have planted many plants to create a natural balance and each year our water begins to clear up at the end of the season. We would like clear water in the begining of the season. We have been on many pond walks and found that many people use UV sterilizers and swear by them.

There seems to be a ton of choices and we are narrowing it down to Gallons Per Hour as the deciding factor. We have 2" piping and that also seems to make a difference on the choices. Originally reading Dr. Foster's articles, they seem to focus in on size of pond and watts.

Any advice on 1) are UV sterilizers effective 2) should we be using our GPH as our guide for selecting the right UV, or gallons and watts?

If you know anyone that has used these and has any other advice, we would greatly appreciate it.

In answer to your questions:

1) UV units work well for floating (microscopic) algae. They'll keep the blooms from happening by preventing the algae exposed to the UV light from reproducing. By doing so, they'll reduce the organic load on the pond and eliminate some of that "root beer" color caused by dissolved organics.

2) Filtration systems are all about flow. Choose a UV unit with inlet and outlet ports the same size as your pipe runs, and make sure that it is rated for GPH. Many of the mass-marketed UV units have low-intensity bulbs that require the water flow through the unit to be slow. They are also constructed of plastic, which deteriorates rapidly under exposure to ...(wait for it)... UV light! Find a unit with stainless steel construction and a high-intensity bulb that will accept your flow rates and work effectively with them. You'll pay more for it up front, but you will only need to buy it once.

Bob

Hello,

Please help, my mother is driving me mad with her pond.

It is in direct sunlight through the day and i know she has too many fish for the size that it is. I would guess that it's 12 x 12 x 4 at the deepest. The water has already turned green and the two brush type filter boxes that she has just can't keep up with it. I often see people giving away their above swimming pools with the filters. Could the pumps and filters be cleaned and used for pond use? I know that I will be digging a new pond this year and just want to make sure that we get better filtration. It would be nice to see the Koi that I bought her last year.

When I was on the pond tour a few years ago I did notice that several people were using the swimming pool type filter, that's what gave me the idea. The "free" part of the used filters was even more intriguing. Please let me know your opinion if you have time. Thank you!

Your mom's problem is definitely filtration. The fact that that you've got floating algae means that your filtration is not up to the fish load and there's lots of ammonia around to feed it. It is fairly clear that neither of you is doing much water testing, and that's got to change if you are to survive in this hobby. A kit that can show you salt, pH, alkalinity, ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, temperature and hardness is necessary for water quality maintenance. Your algae bloom can best be fixed by installing a good-quality high-intensity UV unit and seriously upgrade your biofiltration. Get equipment rated for the flows you'll need to maintain your new pond, so you don't have to buy another one when you dig.

It is true that pond filters and pool filters look a lot alike. The difference is that pool filters are filled with sand and pond filters use a variety of plastic beads and extrusions.You could get a used pool filter and replace the sand with bead, but I'm not sure that the internal piping would be compatible. Trying to use sand in a backyard pond setup is not practical. Too much crud is generated in a balanced ecosystem to allow for flow, and the sand will foul almost instantly. Bead filters require a fairly sophisticated pre-filter setup to function properly.

Bob

Hi Dr. Bob,

We are currently members of the MPKS, and I have always read your articles and commentaries which are always very helpful and quite entertaining. As you do seem very knowledgable, I was hoping that you could help us by answering a few questions, or guide us in the right direction.

We are in the process of "redoing" our pond. We originally did our pond with the acquascape system, and have been slowly redoing it as we have realize that it wasn't very efficient. My husband did build and dig it out himself. We have been very lucky that our koi have been healthy, but we have been very diligent with cleaning, water changes etc. However, we are ditching the all the gravel (we don't have a lot left) and would like to get a new liner, and put in a bottom drain. However, we would like some advice on the best type of filtration system to get for our pond. My husband will be doing a lot of the work himself as he is quite knowledgable in plumbing and electrical. We will most likely hire someone to help dig and also remove boulders.

However, my main questions are:

--What brands would you recommend for a filtration system?

--What bottom drain brands or systems would you recommend?

Or do you think it would be worth our while to consult someone like Mike White (I don't really know him, but again he seems to be quite knowledgable and reputable). But again, we would like to keep our costs to somewhat of a minimum, as we know that these types of things can really get out of control cost wise (from personal experience of course).

Any suggestions or insight would be very helpful to us..thanks.

I have no particular brand preference, since just about all of the filters available run to three basic designs.

1) Big open boxes full of assorted stuff that the water runs through.

2) Big open vats full of fancy stuff that air and water run through (bioreactors and the Nexus filter).

3) Big sealed vats full of beads or fancy media of one sort or another.

The best thing to do is to dig deep and steep to frustrate the herons and raccoons, decide what kind of bottom drain you want to use (through the liner or above the liner), and get everything set. Then come to the Trade Show in early May and talk to everybody. Mike White will be there with a whole bunch of hardware, as will other vendors. Look, learn and choose. You can even ask folks at the Club Table how to build your own.

My own preferences run to an independently pumped skimmer and bottom drain system, each running to its own set of settlers and filters.Return back to the pond should be switchable between waterfalls and streams with an alternate feed to the pond through a simple pipe just above water level for fall and winter circulation as well as an enhancement to water movement. Whether you choose open or closed systems is up to you and depends on your available space, your pond's setup, and the amount and type of maintenance you are willing to do.

Another good idea would be to do the Pond Tour in July, though that may delay you more than you'd prefer.

Bob

hello my name is james and I wrote before with a question and you were a big help thank you, I have another, i am making a 3 container vortex system, my first tank is the vortex where the waste settles, comes in from bottom up to the top into a tube down the tube and out of the settling tank bottom, Is this right, then back up to the mechanical tank top the water drops trought the brushes and out the bottom is this right, then pipes back up to the top of the biological tank where I could have a spray bar with a tee so air would get in trought the top of the tee, dripping water on Japanese matting then down to bioballs and out the bottom of barrel is this right, then going out from bottom to a sand filter, this is optional...then to a pump. please let me know if all this is right and if I need any corrections please help. I have a 7500 gallon pond stoked with about 20 nice size koi, please help to let me know what size pump to use. also how does the pump pump water to each barrel if the pump is after the last filter, wouldn't it just suck air,after it sucked all the water from the last barrel, I know it is all gravity fed, how is it pushing water out from the bottom drains.

<<first tank is the vortex where the waste settles,comes in from bottom up to the top into a > tube down the tube and out of the settling tank bottom,,,,,Is this right >>

No. The vortex settler is indeed the first step, but the flow should enter the basin from the middle and be directed so the water swirls in a circular motion. The larger clumps of waste settle to the conical bottom of the vat for eventual discard. Outflow is off the top.

<<then back up to the mechanical tank top the water drops trought the brushes and out the bottom is this right>>

Again, no. If you are using brushes, the flow should be horizontal through them.

<<the top of the biological tank where I could have a spray bar with a tee so air would get in trought the top of the tee, dripping water on Japanese matting then down to bioballs and out the bottom of barrel is this right >>

That could work.

I'd avoid sand filters. Too much maintenance for too little return, and not terrifically compatible with an open filter system. You'd have to place your pump between the biofilter and the sand filter and run the outlet from the sand to the pond via a high-energy UV to take care of algae. I'd suggest a bead filter rather than sand, anyway.

As far as pumps go, you need to put the entire volume of your pond through your filters *once an hour*! You'll need to pump 7500 gal/hr (125 gallons/minute) and your piping and filters have to be big enough to handle that flow without overflowing.

You'll need to set the system up so that the water level in your filter vats is at the same level as the top of your pond. All piping should be 3" diameter minimum, especially connections from bottom drain to filters and connections between filter vats. Output from the pump and through the bead (sealed) filter and UV can be 2", but it's better to keep the same diameter throughout. As long as your pipe runs are short and straight and big, your vats will fill passively from the pond as their levels are drawn down by the pump.

You need to read up on pond design and filters.

Bob

We have a 1800-2000 gallon pond with 4 koi. We have two pumps running to a biological filter and want to replace the two pumps with one big one and also add a UV filter. We came across a calculation for figuring out how much a pump puts out per hour but cannot seem to find it now. We want to figure out what the equivalent of the two small pumps would be to give us a better idea on what size should be for the one big one. The calculation we saw was to fill a five gallon container and to time how long it takes. One pump took 45 seconds and the other took 1 minute. The two together took 27 seconds. Do you know of this calculation or a different one?

One other question is, we have well water and the "general hardness" is
extremely high. What are your thoughts on lowering the hardness to an acceptable level.

Hi Craig,

Pump #1 is easy. 5gal/1min x 60min/hr = 300gal/hr

Pump#2: 5gal/0.75min x 60min/hr = 400gal/hr

Doing the same math with your combined flows gets you roughly the same number (actually a little less: 667
gal/hr)

Either way, it is inaccurate, because it does not take into account how high you are pumping this water to get to your falls, how long your pipe run is, how many elbows you have in the run or the diameter of pipe you are using. Each one of these parameters adds friction and reduces flow.

In any case, you are severely under-pumped right out of the box. The goal in biofiltration is to present each molecule of water in your system to your biofiltration media at least once an hour. For optimum bioconversion, your pond needs a pump that can deliver 2000gal/hour from your pump inlet to your falls, measured at the top of your falls.

Most good pumps come with a graph indicating flow loss per foot of "head" (how many feet above water level you are lifting the water) I'm sending along a series of tables that will help you estimate how much estimated "pressure head" you need to add to this number to calculate what any prospective pump you are thinking of buying will actually deliver to your falls.

Remember that your filters will also add resistance, especially if it is one of those commercially produced canisters with teeny-tiny inlet and outlet ports. It is actually a great idea to maintain the same pipe diameter throughout your system, and many advanced hobbyists actually increase the diameter of their pipe runs as they get further from their pumps.

The only problem that hardness will give you is a tendency for your kohakus to develop little black dots (called "shimmies") and your kawarimonos to go black in your water. This isn't dangerous to koi health, only dissapointing to the ardent hobbyist who just went to Japan and brought back a $10,000 fish which is now speckly and will *not* win Grand Champion. Don't worry about it, and don't get seduced into adding chemicals or hooking up a water softener (which only adds salt) to try to change it. That way lies madness.

Bob

Hi All!!

Oh Boy!! Just when you think you have outwitted nature. We have just created an obstacle course (fishing line around the pond and other fun stuff) for Harold the Heron, and he has (thankfully) not been back in a few days. Perhaps having given up.

However, we now have a visitor that is new to us. We have researched this little snot and found out that we have a Little Blue Heron visiting. He is about 20 inches tall, short legged and "determined." He (unfortunately) does not walk into the pond, rather he flies in and happily sets up residence on top of the floating water hyacynth.

I suppose our friends have nothing other then the "netting the pond" option and ridding ourselves of all floaters?????What about the lilly pads???? ARGH!!!! Has anyone had to deal with this little bugger???? He is a pint size of his cousin the Great Heron.

Anyway, any suggestions are MOST WELCOME!! We are exhausted with this battle with nature of late. Seemed to have been so quiet here for so long and now suddenly we find ourselves in the throws of a battle of WITS!!! I think we are beginning to blieve that these birds are all talking to each other and sending them our way!!! ARGH!!! THANK GOD through it all, not one loss...........how long can we keep this up before we collapse?? :o) See you all Friday night!!!! Hugzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Deb
Below is the latest resident.........attached is a pic of Harold realizing we are up for the challenge!!! (AND he is walking by the water cannon. Yes, it did go off, but missed him and he pretty much ignored it, he was on a mission)

Oh joy, oh rupture.

Yeah; net, far enough above the water so Little Snot can't sit on the net and fish thru the mesh. Figure the length of beak and neck plus the inches his weight will sag the net.

Congrats on supporting the local endangered wildlife.

Anne

****************************
I recommend substituting the water cannon with a real one.
Bry

We have had a couple of interesting things happen in the natural pond in our backyard the last two summers. We have lived here 19 years and these are both firsts. Last summer, after a heavy rain, we found over twenty crayfish in our inground swimming pool which is about 60 feet from the pond. This happened twice. What would cause them to want to enter our pool?

This spring we looked out and could see an orange glow in the pond and found there to be well over 100 goldfish that are six to eight inches long in the pond. We live in Minnesota and the pond's deepest point is four feet deep, it is 300 feet long and 100 feet wide. We do know that a neighbor put five goldfish from their home aquarium into the pond last summer. Would these goldfish have reproduced and grown this large in this short amount of time? What will happen to them? Will they continue to multiply at an alarming rate? (The pond is also treated monthly from May through September to prevent the growth of algae and other weeds and is not a DNR controlled pond.)

Thank you, in advance, for any insight you can give us to these happenings with our pond!
The Johnsons

The crayfish didn't invade, they were there all the time in dormant eggs. The conditions were right, and they hatched and matured. Don't worry about them, they are a natural (and tasty!)part of your pond's ecology, though with all the algaecides you are dumping in I don't think they are very good for you. Here's a great article about them.

The goldfish have no predators, yet. They will attract herons, egrets and raccoons. They will spawn two or three times a season and each spawn will yield 10,000 eggs per female fish. Within two or three seasons, your population will be dense enough to encourage disease and a mass die-off. If this is truly a natural pond, get some bluegills in there. They'll eat the fry and eggs, and are native to the area. Small perch or maybe a bass or two could also work, though bass usually need colder and moving water that your pond can't supply.

Bob

Bob

Bob

I live in Oregon and have a swimming pool that I have turned into a pond. It is quite deep, 12 feet at the deepest end and about 4 ft in the shallowest area, other than the steps. Yesterday I saw a great blue heron standing on the edge of the deep section, waiting. My fish who come readily to the surface when I appear to feed them were nowhere to be seen. In fact, still this morning I see no sign of my 20 or so koi. My question is this: how big a threat are heron to koi in a large deep pool where they really can't get in and wade around? Are these diving birds? I would hate to lose any of my beautiful fish but also can't imagine trying to cover my 30' by 30' pool/pond. I have already determined from articles that decoy heron don't work reliably. Any thoughts would be most helpful!
Thank you! Laurie

Your koi are smart.

Your heron is frustrated. This is good. Very good. You are 'way too deep for him. Good on ya, mate!

Herons and egrets are wading birds, and can neither swim nor dive. Kingfishers are divers, but are too small to trouble a good-sized koi, though they can take smaller fish. About the only bigger birds capable of causing you trouble would be cormorants, who have essentially taken over two of the heron rookeries in the far western 'burbs, and eagles. We in Chicago are too far inland for ospreys, though you probably are not, but we both have the possibility of suffering a surfeit of Bald Eagles.

Never give a wading bird a place to stand. Never give a diving bird unencumbered air space.

 Bob

I have a small pond and was just wondering if there was any good way of keeping the raccoons away?

Last year, they trashed my water plants and ate my fish. Now I'm afraid to put more fish in this year. Also, I have a friend with a very large pond who is also having problems with raccoons eating his Koi. Any suggestions would really be appreciated.

Ah, critters. So cute. So destructive.

Raccoons are a tough problem, especially if your pond is small and shallow, and even larger ponds are subject to predation if they've got shallow areas where raccoons can sit.

Koi, being basically curious and trained to come towards a disturbance in the water in the hope of food, fall prey to raccoons who use this as their hunting technique. They'll sit in the shallows and pat the water; the fish, hoping for lunch, swim close and become lunch.

As an add-on, the only trick that I've seen work are the IR-actuated "Scarecrows". These are sprinklers hitched to the garden hose and set up so their infrared sensors will pick up raccoon-sized critters in the pond area. The circuitry then delivers a 5-second directed schpritz of cold water on the area, annoying and driving off the 'coon. Also works on groggy humans who forget they've got it activated and stumble into range on fine weekend mornings.

Fencing, netting and chemical repellents are largely ineffective. Yappy little dogs tend to be outclassed by a full-grown boar raccoon.

The best solution to raccoons and herons occurs in the pre-planning stages of pond construction. Steep sides, deep ponds and no shallows remains the best solution. Raccoons can't hunt when they are dog-paddling. They'll do minor damage to your verge plantings out of frustration and spite, but your fish will be safe.

Bob

Hi my name is Michelle and I live in Plainfield, IL.T his winter year I am having a problem with too much water evaporation in my pond. It's wierd! I have a 7ftx 3ft approx 1500gal pond with a de-icer and all pumps/filters off. 75% of the pond is frozen over except around the de-icer and it's only 5 inches of water. What the heck? Why is this happening? I put some water in it but it seems to evaporate again. What else should I be doing so that my fish won't die? I know we're having some frigid air lately but could this be my problem? I was thinking of putting a tarp over the pond and still keep the de-icer, so it creates a "warming house" effect.

Sincerely,
Michelle from Plainfield

I'm afraid that you have a leak somewhere. The amount of open water you've got would not cause that much evaporative loss, even with the air as dry as it is. You are not going to be able to look for the leak until things warm up some, but be suspiucious of anywhere you have exposed pipes, rocks, sharp objects pressed up against the liner, or places where the liner has shifted. Look for soggy or soft areas around the edges of the pond, or for "bubbles" under the liner and soft spots in the sides or bottom of your pond.

If you suspect that the leak is somewhere around the sides, you can let the water level recede until stable, then concentrate your search at that level.

Pipe runs and connections, especially those exposed to freezing weather, are prime locations for water loss.

Covering your pond in this climate is always a good idea, but a tarp will not help much, since it will not prevent evaporative loss (if any) and will not help with sunlight-induced UV warming. You'll be better off with a small greenhouse structure and greenhouse-weight transparent or translucent plastic sheeting. Kits are available from Midwest Trading in St. Charles, IL.

Bob

Hi Dr Bob,

I just recently learned that you were "Dr Bob". I've read some of your articles. I am new (2 years) with having a functioning pond. I have ~8,000 gallon in-ground concrete pond with embedded large rocks and a stone concrete waterfall.

There are many trees in the area and a weeping pine tree all of which, in the fall, causes major work on a daily basis to keep the pond clean. I would like to place pond netting, but it would be very difficult to remove and replace on a regular basis to remove the leaves. I assume that using a power blower to blow the leaves off the netting is probably not a good idea.

I am considering "big top" netting where I place several poles in the pond to support the netting above the water. The deep end is about 5 feet deep and the shallow end only 2 feet deep. If I place netting, what do I do about the frogs?

Any advice you have would be greatly appreciated. I will attach some pictures of the pond to help you see the problem.

Your best bet for tree spit is a skimmer array. Even with concrete construction, there are skimmer designs that can be retrofitted to require the minimum amount of disturbance to your pond margins.

A skimmer is situated at the point in the pond margin farthest from your falls with its outlet set so your pond's water level comes about 2/3 of the way up over the opening. Surface water is drawn into the skimmer either by a submersible pump in the skimmer box or by a dry pump plumbed to the box with a bulkhead fitting. The pump flow can be directed either back to your falls or, preferably, to a seperate filter system independent of your bottom drain. Anything hitting the surface of your pond capable of even brief flotation will be pulled into the skimmer for easy disposal.

I strongly recommend leaf netting in the fall. I use a pre-fab hoop-house kit sold locally by Midwest Trading in St. Charles. (Versa-Quonset) setting up in early October with the leaf netting and then covering with greenhouse-weight poly just before Thanksgiving.
Bob

we have a koi pond and it developed a leak so we thought it would be a good time to build a bog system. We are interested in making a bog filtration system for it. what websites do you recommend to get this info.from. We live in hot AZ. - would a bog system be good in this type of climate?

Bogs in hot climates are difficult. Your biggest challenge will be keeping it cool enough to function; either that or stock it with tropical water plants such as lotus, bamboo (in pots! Bamboo roots will rip right through pond liner) and tropical water lilies. Look around for heat-hardy marginals, and dig it somewhat deeper than you would in more temperate climes. Make sure that it gets partial shade at the peak of the day.

"Bog" filters are not true bogs, since they do not contain peat. What you will be constructing will be closer to a marsh (swamp without trees), but with brisker water movement. Plan on about one-third of your water flow diverted through the marsh and the remaining two-thirds over your falls. You can play with this ratio to suit your own tastes. Do not rely on the marsh to supply all your filtration. You'll still need higher-tech biological and mechanical filtration to keep up with your koi. Your marsh will help with nitrates and nitrites. Sludge, algae, dissolved organics and ammonia will still be the responsibility of your bottom drains, prefilters, protein extractor and bioconverters.

Newer marsh/bog designs incorporate a sump on the bottom that simplifies cleanout. During construction, dig a trench the full length of the bog to accommodate a length of 8-inch perforated drainage pipe. Cut a hole in one end to accept a vertical length of solid-wall pipe long enough to extend above the water surface. Block both ends of the horizontal pipe. Cover with gravel or fine river rock. For cleanout, plunk a high-capacity submersible pump into the vertical pipe and turn it on. Use the effluent to water your flowers and veggies.

Bob