Bought house with koi pond, need help with set up

[qclabrat]

ok, clearly you don't have a bog filter, the basin on top is just as you said to manage water to the water fall.
How was the water previously cleaned? You bought the new pump and filter but the previous owner must have been doing something to clean the water. Also if you have been feeding the fish and the ammonia is not high makes me wonder what I am missing. There are others here who will have questions and suggestions but continue testing the water. You can feed the koi in the same as before but not too much till we figure out what's going on. Keep the aeration going 24/7 for now. Btw, what is under the faux rock and the blue tarp? Not snooping, just investigating....

 

[Regina]

Welcome! That is quite a large well stocked pond you just bought. It is well worth your time and money and learning lots of valuable info.here to keep it good for years to come. Lots of good landscaping too, especially since they are just coming out of a bad winter. I only have a tiny pond so can't help with what you need, but you will hear from others here to help..Good luck

Thank you! I hope we learn quickly so that the fish don’t get hurt. I believe some are over 25 - 30 years old at least, per previous owners.

 

[qclabrat]

sometimes drawing up a simple diagram works better than trying to explain the setup

 

[Regina]

ok, clearly you don't have a bog filter, the basin on top is just as you said to manage water to the water fall.
How was the water previously cleaned? You bought the new pump and filter but the previous owner must have been doing something to clean the water. Also if you have been feeding the fish and the ammonia is not high makes me wonder what I am missing. There are others here who will have questions and suggestions but continue testing the water. You can feed the koi in the same as before but not too much till we figure out what's going on. Keep the aeration going 24/7 for now. Btw, what is under the faux rock and the blue tarp? Not snooping, just investigating....

There are filter pads in the waterfall. They had a UV light but it looks old so we bought a pressure filter. I added pictures of the pump and filter manuals so you can see what we got.

The blue tarp covers the pressure filter (it is not hooked up in today’s pictures because my husband has to get the right size tubing. We got 1 inch but I read pump needs 1.5 inches. We will get right size and hook it up. Where should we put the pump for the pressure filter with UV light?

The faux rock has the air pump under it. It is temporary until we get the nice looking rock cover. We hooked up the 4200 gpg pump to the waterfall. We cut the dead leaves off most plants and got the leaves out.

 

[Regina]

sometimes drawing up a simple diagram works better than trying to explain the setup

 

[Regina]

The nice picture is from the house listing how it looked in the past (maybe last year?). The rusty pump and another black pump were left behind along with a large plastic rock with bottom that has holes and might have held the uv light. The black pump died after a day and the rusty one still works but doesn’t fit in skimmer along with pads. We also found a sump pump hooked up with tubing, that works with oil - we decided not to use it because of potential oil leak (but it works). Everything was in the garage and only a small bubbler and heater hooked up when we moved in. We don’t know where they had the pumps or UV filter.

 

[qclabrat]

View attachment 109585

got it, the previous owner likely ran the water up to the waterfall which has the filters and likely some substrate to remove the ammonia as the number of koi and plants may not be enough. I think you can do the same but since you already have the filter canister, have it positioned between the skimmer and waterfall. And continue to only use one pump in the skimmer like before. You can locate the filter behind the waterfall to hide it. So the water will be filtered and cleaned before going to the waterfall. Having the second pump just for the falls won't clean the water and since you will need to return the water back to the pond from the filter, so why not from the waterfall. I'd give that a try first, then go back to feeding the fish and monitoring the water quality daily. If the test numbers change or the fish appear to be in distress, let us know.

 

[j.w]

@Regina Nice looking pond and fish!