Turnover rates are something that always come up on various forums from time to time and creates quite a bit of a debate.

We always seem to talk about a good turnover between one to two hours, however I have a friend, Robert Wagner (and late, highly respected Carol Wagner) who has a 60 000 litre pond. The filter system is a very simple settlement chamber with an up – down system which consists of mainly brushes and a home made trickle tower. The trickle tower consists of milk creates filled with shade cloth. The pond has no UV lights and is left alone with very little maintenance.

He has over seventy Koi in the pond and the water is crystal clear and the Koi all look happy and healthy, and now wait for it……. The pump is a mere 0.25 KW speck.

What are your views on this?

Hi Colin, I think their pond is a good example of the fact that you do not need a hi teck expensive filtration. They always had show quality koi with high stocking levels and never had serious health problems in all the years I know them.

And they always had the old fashioned up and down filtration, and I believe is is still one of the best. Should there we power outages, you do not run the risk of getting the baddies, as the filter has a lot of water and can survive outages and small mistakes, and a vast surface area for Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter.

Carol was indeed one of the most knowledgeable koi keepers in the Western Cape and I had a lot of respect for both of them. The Koi Society in the Western Cape was booming when Robert was the Chairman. Carol visited so many ponds and sorted out so many problems for members free of charge, and at pond safari's her wealth of knowledge added another dimension to these excursions.

Late Carol Wagner in the blue jeans back in 2006 when I had a spit braai at my house in Table View for the Western Cape Chapter: