Need Advice: Pond Complete, But Water Is Pea Soup Green Should We Drain It All?

[tanyaclick]

Hey fellow koi keepers,
We just finished building our pond (finally!), but we had to leave the filter off for several days during construction. As a result, the water has gone full-on pea soup green. We’ve had the filtration system and UV back on for several days now, but the water still looks like matcha gone rogue—no improvement at all.

We’re also still finishing up our waterfalls and have a lot of fine onyx sediment floating around and sharp shards on the bottom. It’s cloudy, green, and gritty.

My husband and I are seriously considering draining it completely, rinsing off all the surfaces to get rid of the algae, vacuuming out the mess, and starting fresh with clean water before we add any fish. I plan to run our Baki shower filters the fish have been living with for a solid month to help cycle things along in addition to our new filtration setup.

Would love to hear from anyone who’s dealt with this—
Is a full drain and fresh water the best move at this point? Or should we tough it out and let the filters + UV do their job longer?

Here's a video:

Thanks in advance!

Our pond is about 10,000 gallons
Running an alpha Nano X2 6.0
Prefilter
240 W Aqua ultraviolet UV
Two Rhino II aerating bottom drains
3/4 hp performance Pro artesian2 HF pump on the filter, bottom drains, UV.
1/2 hp on the Helix skimmer that returns straight to the lower falls

We have dumped our entire lives and savings into building this Pond over the last 2 years and researching it with all of you etc so please no criticism or suggestions on different equipment etc etc because the pond is built and this is what it is.

Parameters
PH 8.4 on a fresh high range API test kit
Nitrite, nitrate and Ammonia are all 0 on a fresh API test kit
There are no fish

Thank you

 

[Mmathis]

No, don’t drain it. If you do that, it’s just going to happen all over again. It’s a natural part of the “cycle” a pond goes through. You say you don’t have fish, but do you plan to add fish? A lot of advice will depend on whether you have fish or not (using chemicals isn’t recommended with fish).

Add shade, add plants, add water movement (aeration), check to see if you have yard run-off (fertilizers getting into the water will 100% lead to algae).

 

[addy1]

Agree all new ponds need to go through the pea green water stage, wait it out.

 

[sissy]

peroxide and koi clay is what I use . Plants help and less feeding of fish

 

[sissy]

koi cat a couple of scoops turns the water white and binds to the green stuff and sends it to your filter and water turns clear after a a half hour

 

[tanyaclick]

Thank you everyone. What about the concern around all the little sharp shards of rock in there?

 

[Lisak1]

Your pond is lovely!

But to be honest, it's not even that green. We've seen true PEA SOUP water before - yours appears to be looking green due to the algae on the rocks. If you really want to assess the water, scoop out a clear glass or mason jar full and see what it looks like outside of the pond. You can also then see if it's floating algae - which is what causes that pea soup green - or just tinted green.

As for the tiny shards - I wouldn't worry to much about them, unless you're talking every inch covered in shards... which I doubt!

 

[GBBUDD]

Welcome to the group.
Pond looks very nice. Another big pond joins the site.

Will there be lots of swimming ?

I would agree not to worry about the color and to not do a water change but having shards of Onyx? We can't see what or how sharp these shards are. But you do have a rubber liner than can be punctured easily?

Just starting off if they are sharp I'd get it out now. If that ment a pond vac or draining that's up to you.

So what size bakki and what's the other filter you mentioned.