Garden Fish Pond Installation and Care. More Top Tips To Ponder

1. Make your pond come alive at night too. Install a lighting system in the pond. Underwater pond lights are safe since they use low voltage (12V or 24 volt) systems. Other than being effective and low voltage: therefore safe for children and animals, the cost is also low. Low voltage underwater lights are also easy to install. A wide range of available pond lights include, floating globes, underwater spotlights, in ground spotlights, coloured lenses and so on.

2. We recommend that for most small to medium sized ponds that rigid PVC pipes should not be used either. These pipe or tubing systems have disadvantages in a water garden. Transparent hose and garden hose pipe kink easily. Rigid pipes need expert fitting and are difficult from a maintenance viewpoint and to be able to change direction in the pipe run then a pipe fitting has to be installed at the cost of pressure drop in the water flow circuit. I strongly recommend ribbed hose which is normally black and therefore opaque in colour. Ribbed hose pipe does not kink. It is extremely versatile and can be bent easily to change pipe direction without the pipe diameter becoming kinked or restricted. Do spend a bit more on fittings and tubing to reduce your pond keeping maintenance hassles. Avoid using jubilee clips (unless stainless steel) which rust and become difficult to remove for maintenance. If you must use clear tubing make sure there are no kinks in the line. This will severely restrict flow from your pump. Whatever you use always avoid sharp bends and minimise the number of connections in the lines.

3. Always use the largest diameter hose tubing or pipe you can to join your pond pump to the filter or waterfall. You'll often see a fitting connection called a stepped hose fitting (different stepped diameters on same plastic connector). Always use the largest if you can and cut off the smaller diameter connecting lengths.  The reason is that larger diameter pipe interferes less with flow rate from pump and because the pressure drop is reduced flow is maintained closer to manufacturer's specifications. If a pump is supplied with a 25mm outlet then use 25mm diameter pipe. If the pipe is to be very long, say 8 metres then it would be useful to install a reducer to increase the pipe size from 25mm to say 32mm. What is important is to reduce pipe length and increase pipe diameter to get the best out of your pump. Do not use 13mm (1/2 inch) fittings and pipe except on very smalls pumps. Refresh your memory about pond pump head and also pond pump flow and I suggest in general add 20% to the head you think you need to compensate for flow losses due to pipe length and pipe restrictions of whatever kind.

4. Do not add chemicals to a pond unless absolutely necessary and you know what you are doing. The absence of a filter is more often than not the reason people add chemicals. When the situation is reached that chemicals are to be added to a pond then this should only be done under guidance and certainly by following written instruction to the letter ... this almost certainly means you need to know pond volume accurately.. It is rarely necessary to treat pond water. Some exceptions are when it is important to start up a filter from scratch then a bio starter can be used. These are non chemical and are perfectly safe to add. Another time is if you get blanketweed.

5. What do you do with casually offered pond keeping advice (especially with respect to the latest gadgets)? Nothing until you have spoken to a reliable source of information and products. If you are not sure ask someone who can give you good advice. If the advice is sound and makes sense and can be backed up by example, years of experience, top class customer service and application, or published information then it is probably good advice. However if something does not make good sense to you be careful and do seek further advice. A bad installation is expensive to fix and dead goldfish or dead koi stay dead.

Another 5 water gardening quick tips here

Previous 5 water gardening quick tips here

This table will help you with converting units from one type to another (for example 1 Imperial Gallon/min = 0.16 Cu. Feet/min, 4.55 Litres/min or 0.005 Cu. Metres/min) ...

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