Pea Soup Gold Fish pond and Waterwall

[Waterbug]

It's kind of a crazy thing. It's widely believed in pond forums that plants remove nutrients and starve algae creating clear water. People think green water means high nutrient level. But the opposite is normally true. Green water is almost a sure test of zero ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. Clear water is almost a sure test of some nitrate level and maybe even ammonia.

Do you have a KH test? It might be helpful to know the KH level in the pond and also of your source water. With a drip water change this is way less important than static water type ponds where knowing KH is very important.

Not exactly sure how your fountains are set up (are they coming out of the wall?)....a small chain can be attached to the out flow. The surface tension of water will cause it to "stick" to the chain and flow over the chain and down into the water. Common trick used on rain gutters as down spouts. Would act as a Trickle Tower type filter to boot. I might be able to offer better ideas with some pictures of the fountains.

As I probably said earlier...You will want to test ammonia like once a day when you do start to remove algae by whatever method. 10% weekly water change probably isn't enough to be your only ammonia controller and some bio will be needed. However that bio could just be the current pond liner, pipes, etc. Testing will give you the answer. The beauty is should you start seeing an ammonia problem you could turn up the drip to 10% per day until the bio gets up to speed. After everything settles down you don't have to test hardly at all.

 

[Keith]

Didn't have time to get anything done this weekend unfortunately.

The fountains are just flexible tubing coming out of the wall.

Have some different connector and splitter pieces, could put a tube horizontally across connected to all 3 wall outlets and put a whole bunch of holes in it and have a little wall of drips. Same kind of idea as the water wall, but without the actual physical wall, so just dripping straight into the pond. Won't look very good though. Yeah, not exactly sure, would be good to figure something out with these fountains because building the actual waterwall will probably take a lot more work than I realise.

I don't have a KH test, guess I should get one of those too.

Thanks again!

 

[mikedd]

Had the same problem earliar this year, got abag of barley straw from the pet shop put it in plastic net bags submerged it below the w/fall takes about a month to decay and a month on blanket weed totally eradicated, farmers here in the uk put numourus bales in lakes with the same effect, Just a thaught!!

 

[Waterbug]

Keith, there are lots of options, endless really. If you do the tube with holes thing...consider drilling the holes along the top of the horizontal tube, so water coming out is pointing up instead of down or out horizontally. That way you can make larger holes, less clogging. If the holes are level an even amount of water will come out each hole no matter the hole size.

However, it's really difficult to get an even drip across the length. With flexible hose it's impossible as it will sag. Consider connecting the current tube to PVC pipe which won't sag so one less problem. The next issue is getting the holes aligned. Larger diameter PVC pipe is much more forgiving. Drilling a 1/8" hole in a 2" pipe means the hole is almost flat. Drilling the same 1/8" hole in 1/2" pipe and the hole is much more cupped and if you're off center even a little a lot more water will come out of that hole. So consider a 1.5", 2" or 3" pipe. Most big box stores and even local hardware stores sell short lengths, like 2'.

The transition connector from tube to PVC can be very expensive and bulky as you made need several different step ups. Better look and cheaper is to glue end caps onto the pipe. Then drill a hole just a bit tighter than the hose thru the end cap and pipe. Push the hose into the hole which will be water tight (is the hole is tight). If you taper the hose end it will go in easier.

PVC can be painted, even faux painted to look like wood, rock, tile or whatever. If you really wanted to get creative you can melt the pipe a little and push in on the bottom and sides to make it look less like a pipe.

A cool look I like is to paint the PVC black or dark brown. Then tie tree branches from the yard horizontally along the pipe using steel wire. The wire will rust and blend right in. Water will also flow over the branches so you can control flow bu adding and removing bits of branch. Pretty easy and you can always tweak it later. Think beaver dam.

Partial water wall
You can do the water wall but just not the entire wall. Just a band. However, I would assume the builders never made the wall waterproof. It's a fair amount of work, takes some knowledge (we hire cheap, no smart) and problems don't normally appear for a long time so it isn't their problem. So to me even a partial water wall would still be a lot of work.

Trough
You could also form a stone trough using slate tile. Pretty cheap material, pretty easy to work, easy to find. Keep the front top edge lower than the back so water overflows the front edge. You also want the front edge of the bottom to be lower so water falls off the front and doesn't run back underneath the bottom and down the wall. After you get water running you can adjust that top front edge using a file as slate is easy to cut. Just file down the high spots until flow is as even as you like. I like a round file (rat-tail file).

You could also check out making a trough out of hypertufa. Maybe not formal enough for you pond. Cast concrete could work to. Not as hard as it sounds. Both of these would probably need to be supported by a length of angle iron on the bottom.

Speaking of steel...for a modern look you could have a trough welded for you out of steel. Same deal, bottom sloped down toward front, top lower than back.

Barley straw.

 

[Dave 54]

One thing we are all doing here at the moment guys is we are confusing the poor chap nobody seems to want to get back to basics with Keith which is what we should in reality be doing I've seen it time and time again on other forums .
Keith you really must do your home work on this as you cant go switching a pond off like this it will in the end kill off your goldfish. The fish are jumping because your ammonia/ nitrite are more than possibly off the scale, I take it you havent got a water test kit either. Lets get down to the basics first off get a decent filter, Pump and U/V-C, plus a test kit that covers Ph, Ammonia, Nitrite and nitrate. The filter and UV-C you'll find to be almost silent so you wont have to turn it off (something you should never do)apart from when cleaning the filter Next what do you know about keeping fish, please dont be embarrased we all start out somewhere and we all mak mistakes. May I suggest you buy this book on Goldfish it will help you no end to progress in our hobby being Christmas soon it would make a brilliant present to get. The Books is called Fancy Goldfish A Complete Guide To Care and Collecting By Dr Erik L Johnson DVM and Richard E Hess with PhotoGraphs by Fred Rosenzweig ISBN 1859749577 Its a very good book to read and will give you everything you need to know about keeping and treating goldfish and their fancy cousins. You should do a routine water change say every two weeks looking at the pond , remember to buy a declorinator and dose the water with the correct amout when you put fresh water back in the pond. The Water test kits should be done once a week every week so that you know what your water perameters are and as to what it is doing. Do not over feed ( just as much as it says on the container no more). Maintain your filtration from time to time depending on what size you have etc , above all though enjoy the hobby . People would sometimes make out that fish keeping is rocket science, it isnt, its just plain common scense remeber that and what the book tells you and you won go wrong rgrds Dave

 

[Ruben Miranda]

You tell it Dave
Nice post :lamp5:

Dave Wrote:

One thing we are all doing here at the moment guys is we are confusing the poor chap nobody seems to want to get back to basics with Keith which is what we should in reality be doing I've seen it time and time again on other forums .
Keith you really must do your home work on this as you cant go switching a pond off like this it will in the end kill off your goldfish. The fish are jumping because your ammonia/ nitrite are more than possibly off the scale, I take it you havent got a water test kit either. Lets get down to the basics first off get a decent filter, Pump and U/V-C, plus a test kit that covers Ph, Ammonia, Nitrite and nitrate. The filter and UV-C you'll find to be almost silent so you wont have to turn it off (something you should never do)apart from when cleaning the filter Next what do you know about keeping fish, please dont be embarrased we all start out somewhere and we all mak mistakes. May I suggest you buy this book on Goldfish it will help you no end to progress in our hobby being Christmas soon it would make a brilliant present to get. The Books is called Fancy Goldfish A Complete Guide To Care and Collecting By Dr Erik L Johnson DVM and Richard E Hess with PhotoGraphs by Fred Rosenzweig ISBN 1859749577 Its a very good book to read and will give you everything you need to know about keeping and treating goldfish and their fancy cousins. You should do a routine water change say every two weeks looking at the pond , remember to buy a declorinator and dose the water with the correct amout when you put fresh water back in the pond. The Water test kits should be done once a week every week so that you know what your water perameters are and as to what it is doing. Do not over feed ( just as much as it says on the container no more). Maintain your filtration from time to time depending on what size you have etc , above all though enjoy the hobby . People would sometimes make out that fish keeping is rocket science, it isnt, its just plain common scense remeber that and what the book tells you and you won go wrong rgrds Dave

Ruben

 

[Keith]

Raising this from the dead, but just thought I'd conclude the thread.

Firstly big thanks to everyone who posted here!

The pond was my late mother's thing and when she died it got neglected, so really appreciate this forum helping us out.

In the end we decided to detach the wall fountains from the pump. The landscapers obviously had no idea what they were doing (they've since gone out of business). The pump was too small for the system. The narrow streams of water from the fountain dropping from such a high height was very loud. Also everything was difficult to get at as there's a shed directly behind the wall. Just bad design.

We did try various things to dampen the noise from the water streams from the wall fountains, but none of them were very satisfactory. Mostly resulted in losing water off the side of the pond. Also I think the low velocity of the water in the tubing for the wall fountains made it more likely to get clogged, which it did several times, which was a pain.

So now the wall fountains are purely decorative, and the pump only goes through the dragon statue (comes out of his mouth).

Based on your guys suggestions about reducing the noise, we ended up attaching a chain to the dragon (with a zip tie around his snout). The water trickles down the chain into the pond, and makes almost no noise (the dragon was much quieter than the wall fountains to begin with anyway). So now we can run the pump 24/7 no problem.

The pond's been been crystal clear since shortly after we put in the UV filter (thankyou those who suggested that). Was really amazed about that at the time. Just lately the light seems to have stopped working so I'll need to replace that before the summer or we may be back to pea soup.

I also put an offshoot from our dripper system that runs next to the pond, into the pond. Has a valve so can adjust how much water is going in. I use that to keep the pond topped up instead of in the old days being like "oops the pond has gone down a bit, better get the hose".

The fish have spawned several times. The pond is overpopulated for sure, but I guess between the rain and the dripper there's enough turnover in fresh water to keep the ammonia levels around 0. I think most of the spawn get eaten now anyway with so many large fish in the pond. Anyway will keep an eye on it. Been stable for awhile though so hopefuly stays that way.

We also got new neighbours who we generally get along with better and haven't so much as mentioned our pond, so that's a nice stress relief too. They also removed a tree which dropped a lot of stuff into the pond (and housed lots of Indian Minas), more good news.

The plants in the pond are also doing very well. The reeds in particular, which are now in 2 pots , keep growing like mad.

Anyway in conclusion, we have lots of healthy (and I like to think happy) fish and a clean low maintenance pond with a tranquil trickling sound.

On a side note I've also now done water/waste water treatment/management, environmental chemistry and water engineering subjects at uni, and the fish pond did get me interested in that kinda thing to start with so thanks again everyone!