A while back we realised that that Pond #1 had a problem with the main drain that is used to flush the filter chambers. The second chamber contains "Palmiet" and over a period of around 10 months these have completely filled the box in a solid mass of roots and it also managed to get past the stopper I placed on the 110mm outlet.

It took some serious manpower to unroot that bush. Luckily the whole "worm" of roots could be pulled out of the pipe.

I will need to cut a lot of vegetation out at spots. After struggling to get the stuff to grow now I am overwhelmed

The seasonal algae bloom is now in it's end cycle and yesterday we added 200kg of salt to the pond system. Sofar everything is fine and the algae is managed manually in the filters. The salt has reduced them dramatically. This time I isolated my bottom drain filter chambers on pond #1 and #2 ... no need to stress the plants with the salt.

I have a Hamerkop that is showing his face here from time to time and I left him alone because it is not easy to get to the fish but it appears that he managed to grab a 150mm fish without success. However the fish has a nasty scar down the left flank. I have the fish in a tank for treatment.

This incident came a day after I decided to cull the scrap out of my ponds and start getting better quality fish. The incident with the injured fish made me rethink this again and I have decided that with the size of my complex I am not going to risk expensive fish in it. Fact is that I will maintain good pond fish in the system and will build a smaller pond for better fish.

My main reason for my decision lies in the fact that if I should get a health issue in my system I am not going to spend thousands of Rands on treating 120,000 liters of water.

My first priority now is to build some QT facility and then I will start removing the less good looking fish and get some new ones.

I watched my system closely for the past year and I want to do an experiment when I build the QT facility ... I want to see for how much it can be done and do it without using pressurized filtration. I want to scale what I have down to around 8,000 liters.

The green peasoup overwhelmed my ponds last week on Monday and visibility was less than 100mm into the water.

I replaced the two UV's and this morning I can see the pond bottom. Water is still murky but it is improving fast.

I cleaned out the bottom drain and fillter system on pond 1 and 2 as well.

The plants are all showing strong growth now and I think the algae issues should be over for the season now.

It was a bad week on Rhenosterkop ... 2 of my three pumps failed on the same day, hours apart. Both Leaders and both under one year old. I will place a new one in tomorrow but in the meantime the flow is down to a mere trickle.

I cut back severely on feeding the fish while this flow is so slow and the water is staying clear.

Here are two shots I did at the ponds ...

Way back when I started this thread I said that one of my missions was to provide future pond builders with a coherent and documented record of my trials and tribulations. I do believe that many people have found value from what they read here and contributions and responses in the thread indicates that it is read.

Now I started off in this adventure as a complete novice with zero koi experience. What made my life difficult was that although the web is full of information about koiponds I found very little information for a waterbody size of what I planned to do.

My first acid issue was the insistance by many that one needs to turn your whole water volume at least once in a two hour period. That would mean that I must pump around 60,000 liters per hour. It was completely out of the question for me because the electricity consumption was just not possible and further more the size of the piping and pumps would be just not worthwhile for a garden setup like mine.

Two very valued members of this forum sent me messages and they both indicated that I need not let this circulation issue derail my mission because most of the documentation and contributions were not applicable to such a big volume of water. It was mostly Jaco and Chris that encouraged me to proceed.

Once that issue was out of the way I sat down and turned my attention to nature. I had to find answers in nature for most of the potential water quality issues because I have seen hundreds of small water streams and pools in the wild that were healthy and crystal clear.

I did decide right in the beginning that I will not install any pressure systems and that I want the whole complex to be as natural as possible with gravity as my friend.

120,000 liters is what I roughly circulate here and I decided that I will assign at least 30% of that to active bio and natural water quality control. My pods are three separate ponds all linked by a 600mm wide stream and 50mm gravity fed pipes.

All my water enters the system through the primary waterfall at the head of Pond #1.



This is the waterfall and I will now discuss some of the built in features.

When you look at the steps you will note that at each cascade there are some loose quarts stones. Behind that stone there is a hollow stretches around 200mm in under the step to form sort of a cave. There is a layer of stones that goes right to the back of the cave. Water splashing from the cascade keeps the cave wet and lots of water run back and then returns through the stones to the next cascade.

This cave and quarts combination provides me with the following ...

1. Shaded area with lots of surface for bacteria and moss to grow.
2. Lots of cascading and splashing to promote gas exchange.

These two advantages plays an important role in managing nitrites and amoniac as well as adding oxygen to the water.

A very important role of the cave is that it forms a soundbox that projects the noise from the cascading straight out forward accross the pool and as such baffles the sound to such an extent that if you walk along the pool towards the waterfall you will hear that once you are level with cascade the noise from the falling water drops by almost 80%. This was important because my bedroom is 3 meters away from that waterfall. The result of the design is that I cannot here the waterfall at all in my bedroom.

Another feature of this waterfall is that the top receptacle basin contains yellow irises that were packed in between quarts stone and all the water runs through the roots of the plants. Over time it was interesting to see how the plants slowly but surely took hold and as the bio mass in the ponds increased by the growth of the fish the plants became more virile due to the increase in nitrates.

I have one pump that brings water through two UV lights to the waterfall and ends in a spraybar. The other two pumps deliver water to the 2x 5000l Pennels drums in the koppie from where it runs by gravity to the waterfall.



This is a recent shot of the waterfall. Note the condition of the irises and here can also see the effect of my "Boer maak a plan" foam container

Next time I will discuss and explain the bottomdrain system of Pond #1.

Enjoy.

Here is the section on the way my bottomdrain in Pond #1 works.

I installed a normal 110mm waste/stormwater sewage pipe and fittings in the floor of the pond and it exits into the first trough of the series of troughs. The final trough only has a 50mm outlet the runs by gravity and spills into Pond #2. The reason for the small outlet was to constrain the volume of water that flows through the bottom drain. If this flow is too strong it will affect the stream between Pond #1 and #2 too much. I can also adjust the height of the 50mm outlet in order to cut back or increase the flow.



The primary trough is clean except for two plants and some quarts rock to give it some visual style I have also provide an extension to the inlet 110mm so that I can stop the bottom drain if I need to clean or flush the troughs.

Once everything was in place I blocked the outlet and allowed the troughs to balance with the Pond Level. I then trimmed the inlet to be on the same height as the stream outlet in order to ensure that if the power should fail the bottomdrain will not drag the pond level down too low. Next I chopped the outlet 15mm below the inlet height and that was it.

All the troughs has bags of stone and pots with plants in. All plants was planted directly into the pots with only crushed stone. I use Yellow Iris, White Varkoor and Olifants Oor plants in the troughs.

Up to March 2009 I had to supplement the plant feed with liquid kelp and earthworm tea because the fish did not produce enough food for the plants.

There are 46 koi ranging from around 180mm to 280mm in the pond now and the plants are doing well. There is also a number of stray goldfish, vlei kurper and mollies in the Pond #1 System. This year I might go and find a healthy big Blue Kurper to predate the strays.

The maintenance on Pond #1 is limited to cleaning the grid at the stream inlet and occasionally sweeping some dust and debris towards the drain. We flush the bottomdrain weekly and flush the bottom drain troughs once a month.

There are no complex routing or bio balls in the system and all water run over, through and past stone and plants. The water in the outlet trough is crystal clear.

I can also see some suspended bio material in the water and it provides food for the mollies, platies and kurpers in the vegetation pond.

Up to November 2008 I tested my water regularly, almost daily and the last test was done 18 November 2008. Since then I check the condition of the plants and look at water clarity.

I am comfortable that Pond #1 is healthy and the fish are growing well and seems happy.

This pond is around 1400mm deep and my kids use it to float in when the days are hot. No jumping or diving.

The volume of the pond is around 40,000 liters. The initial koi stock was placed to give me around 1,000 liters per fish.

Hope this is of value and please feel free to comment or ask questions. One of my mission objectives was to get a pond system going that runs as close as possible to nature and do not have massive maintenance issues.

Thank you.

Well a week ago I replaced the two broken Leader pumps with a .75 CRI submersible and my koi was very impressed with me.

7 days later and the water is looking black ehrn I look through my study window. I will pull the little ESPA out too and add a .56 CRI in it's place. That should give me a substantial increase in volume over what I had.

Have fun

Although the Koi is what this forum is about, I thought it time to share with you some of the non-Koi activities around my ponds.

I am a keen photographer and do enjoy shooting the birds in my garden. This passion was one of the factors that inspired me to build the ponds.



We chased the bird whenever we saw him and my Jack Russel also chase him. Later on I reverted to shooting around him with the pellet gun. Then one morning early I see him eating something next to the veggie pond and decided that it is not worth it ... I pulled the .22 out of the safe and as I got him in the scope I saw clearly that he was eating a frog. Well that saved his life.

After that one incident of the fish being injured slightly I have not seen any koi being bitten. I have seen him working the filter boxes and little streams and taking the frogs out. He has found out where the frogs hide in the stream and once a day he is here and he picks up a few frogs.

The koi notice him and sink down to the floor of the pond ... way out of his reach.

I assume he is going to get a goldfish or two and may pick up some kurpers but it seems like he is way more interested in the frogs.

Baie mooi fotos. Is dit 'n Canon kamera in gebruik?

WOW

Baie goeie kamera. Hoop ek kan eendag een bekostig. Hier is 2 fotos wat ‘n vriend van my geneem het in Rwanda. Ook ‘n Canon

wow @ Marius......thats a once in a lifetime experience that!!! Something I would treasure for life!!!

Very special shots marius but they can do with some Post Processing

Today I am going to show you some more of the activities around the ponds. As you can imagine there was a huge amount of ground work to be sorted out around the ponds after the construction and here I also tried to minimize the future amount of maintenance that will be needed.

Here are some of the flowers that were employed ...