Pond Maintenance Relief

For someone that has ever owned a pond, they know that koi pond maintenance is not the funnest part. Our objective is to keep your koi pond maintenance minimal! It can be dirty, it smells, and just never ending if you get behind schedule. Thankfully for koi and goldfish, they can live in water that's not quiet perfect. Unfortunately for us, we might not see the problems going on in their pond and it will continue to get grosser and your pond maintenance will seem to never end.

If you want minimal koi pond maintenance, the water conditions need to be perfect, or at least near perfect. Well what does this mean? It simply means that the levels, such as the nitrites, nitrates and ammonia, need to be kept to a minimum. High levels means more pond maintenance. What causes high levels of this is one of two things, or a combination of both; overstocking your pond, or having improper or insufficient filtration. A common mistake is overstocking the pond, which is very easy to do since they grow to be very large in short time. The more fish you have the more filtration needed and the more pond maintenance you will have to do!

Its well into sprint, if you have't done your yearly pond maintenance, you need to do it as soon as possible! You do not want to fall behind and make your pond maintenance worse. The first thing to do is remove as much muck as you can from the bottom of the pond. Cut off and remove dead vegetation. To clean your filter mats and bio media, just shake them off and give a good rinse with pond water, not tap water. Never clean your filters with tap water because it contains chlorine and will kill the beneficial bacteria. Freshen the water emptying about half way and refilling with dechlorinated water. You may want to try and do this slowly in case any of the koi's immune system are low, you don't want to shock them. Just be sure to dechlorinate the water. I use dechlorinator that comes in powder form. You simply mix it with some water and distribute around the pond. It's much cheaper than liquid dechlorinator. For the same price you can get about 10 times the amount of dechlorinator.

So you've done everything, you've done your yearly pond maintenance and its still not clear and your pond maintenance is just never ending... what do you do now? If you're cleaning constantly, and pulling out string algae constantly, it may be time to think about adding another or bigger filter to minimize your pond maintenance. There are many options but be sure to choose one that's the proper size for your pond. And if your problem is too many fish, I doubt you're going to want to get rid of them, so buy a filter that can handle the amount of fish or start building a bigger pond.

Pond clarity can be controlled by using many different products. UV filters work great and fast for getting rid of green water! There's also quick fixes and fish safe chemicals you can use that will help but remember you're not fixing the problem. A simple trick to keeping water clear is the use of barley straw. Also another thing I recommend which drastically reduced my pond maintenance was the use of gravel, it traps debris from floating all over and clouding the water.

Don't spend all summer doing pond maintenance! These few tips should help you minimize your koi pond maintenance and let you enjoy your pond more!


------

This site has everything you can need -
Macarthur Watergardens