There are 2 ways that a person can manage their pond, in my opinion.
You can micromanage it, keeping the water crystal clear, adding chemicals, doing water changes, cleaning the pond bottom, constantly testing the water, maintaining strong filtration,
Or,
You can let the forces of nature look after it, letting the fish feed themselves, utilizing plants and substrate for chemical (and sometimes mechanical) filtration, with you providing water circulation so the water temperature is evenly spread out and so nutrients are spread out in order for bacteria and microrganisms to consume excess nutrients, letting algae exist in a sufficient amount to aid in maintiaining high water quality.
I may have missed a few points, but hopefully you get my point.
If you try to mix the two methods, you'll probably wind up being unhappy with your pond.
I can't say I agree with this Mitch.
First of all, almost all of the worst case scenarios I've seen with backyard ponds are ones that would fit in to your second pond management scheme where the ponds were under filtered and essentially neglected. Full of muck and algae and overgrown plant and weeds. More suitable to breeding mosquito then raising fish.
I do agree that people can try and over manage their ponds, especially when it comes to adding chemicals and bottled retail pond products, but usually this is in response to some undesirable condition occurring in their pond, either real or perceived, that the person is trying to change (in a big hurry), rather then letting things balance out gradually and more naturally.
In my opinion the best managed ponds are something in between, but this is where you say people will "wind up being unhappy with their ponds".
Of course no two ponds are alike, but as a general rule small ponds tend to need a lot more "micromanagment" then large ponds, simply because large ponds, because of their shear volume, have a natural buffering mechanism built into them. Meaning things that effect fish like PH, temperature, ammonia and nitrite levels, which tend to stay stable or change very slowly in larger bodies of water, can change very quickly and radically in small ponds, and it would be wise to monitor and managed them more judiciously.
Of course a big 10,000 gal pond that is neglected and allowed to develop serious problem can be a much bigger problem to fix then 200 gal pond with a serious problem.
In the situation of the OP of this thread with spitter (sputter
) tubes plugging up, I'd say it's just another case of small pond, with small inadequate filtering equipment, needing more maintenance (micromanagment). A pond vacuum might help the situation, and vacuuming any pond would certainly will help in the long run, but it sounds like they might just need some sort of pre-filters on their spitter tubes.
