Ponds and Water Gardens. Top Tips To Ponder

1. Your pond should be located where you can enjoy it. This means you should be able to see it from the house ideally. You should be able to enjoy and sip that sundowner next to it. Your visitors, family and friends should also be able to enjoy and admire it for the life it brings. Let it be THE FOCAL POINT of your whole garden. Avoid full shade but  partial shade is a good idea from the fishe's point of view. Plants especially water lilies will provide wonderful shade and hiding places for kop and goldfish. Do not put the pond close to deciduous trees if you can avoid it because of falling leaves in autumn. Don't put your pond in a place where it will annoy the neighbours. Electrics are an important part of pond building so make sure you have access to power and install electrics safely.

2. The absolute basics for every fish pond ... install a good biofilter and UVC (Ultra Violet Clarifier) system. These items are best bought as a combined unit and think of using a pressurized system to enable easy hiding.  It goes without saying that you need a correctly specified pump.

3. The meaning of information on most pond pump boxes. Be careful when you see the words MAXIMUM HEAD and MAXIMUM FLOW. Make sure you understand what this means. Do visit the pages linked here. In summary ... pump head means the head or height difference between the water surface and the waterfall , you need to pump to. For maximum head with reference to pump flow means the flow will be 0 litres per hour - i.e. there is zero flow from any pump operating at maximum head. This information should be ignored or used only to compare one pump to another and then only in the same range of pumps. This information has mislead many people into buying the incorrect pump. It is important to know how much water the pump can handle at different practical heads or height differences between the water surface and the waterfall inlet for example.

4. Many retailers who sell pumps will never mention how much money you can save by thinking closely about the pond pump system in your pond along with the advantages of low power consumption pumps yet this is a very important part of a purchasing decision. In fact your concerns over running costs should outweigh those concerning the cost price. In ponds where you have a waterfall it often makes economic sense to use 2 pumps instead of one and save lots of money as well as create a situation where you always have a back up pump ... remember your pond filter must run 24 hours per day every day.

5. What are the absolute basics you need to know about pumping water around a pond circuit? First understand that a pump acts like your heart and mine ... it supplies life sustaining oxygen dissolved in water to fish and pond filter bacteria that clean and purify pond water. As a basic rule of thumb a pump should pump the contents of the pond through the complete system about 12 to 24 times a day. At this flow rate there is a good ecological balance between the needs of plants, fish and the biofilter in a pond system. You may want to pump more than this if you want an impressive waterfall effect ... use the basic formula 250 to 350 litres per hour of water per 1 inch or 2.5 cm of waterfall overflow lip width.  A pond of volume 4,000 litres would be happy having a flow rate between 2,000 and 4,000 litres per hour. A pond of volume 2,000 litres would be happy having a flow rate between 700 and 2,000 litres per hour. The point is to get the flow rate somewhere between one third and about two thirds of the pond volume. Don't go crazy ... if your pond is say 1,000 litres don't get a pump that can do 5,000 litres per hour

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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