Vacuuming a small pond with an aquarium siphon...

[JohnHuff]

During the Winter I'd kept myself busy with my indoor tank and now Spring is finally here and it's time to clean the outdoor pond! The first order of business was to sweep all the surface stuff off and clean the waterfall and the pre-filters. The next job is usually to vacuum the bottom of the pond. I've been using a Sears Wet-Dry vac over the past few years but I'd always wanted to see if I could do something with a simple tank siphon. It's just one of these things:

You stick one end into the pond and make sure the other end is below the surface level of the pond and atmospheric pressure will do the rest once you start it. Well, it worked OK. The siphon works, but the tube is small. When I sucked big pieces of algae into it, it got stuck and I had to start the siphon process again but I did manage to clean the parts of the pond that I could reach.

Conclusion: Using a tank siphon is a viable method to clean very small ponds (I estimate anything under 500 gallons) that are less than 2ft deep and can be reached around the edges. The main advantage of this is that the siphon only costs $25 and you can probably DIY it with some PVC pipes and a hose. It's slow enough that you won't suck any fish in and they were curious about it. This is probably not useful for most of us but I can recall some forumers with small ponds asking about vacuuming before, so this is something that could be useful for them!

 

[Waterbug]

Also has to be a raised pond.

Here's Dustin showing one in action.

I knew a lady years ago who built a siphon vac for a very large pond, like, well I don't remember, but I think 10-15k. Worked great suction wise but she had other issues.

 

[HARO]

The efficiency of a siphon depends on the height of the water surface above the open hose end. If this drop is only a foot or so, you will get very slow water flow, but if your pond is on a hillside and the end of the hose is 10' down the hill, you could remove some serious waste!
John