Our New Pond from holland

[B.Scott]

Here you can see my situation at the beginning. An Answer filter retro-fitted into a smallish 70cm vortex. While I did like the answer and the result it gave, the power costs were wearing me down quite a bit.. Having gotten advise from Maurice on Koi-Bito I decided to follow his example and convert to static kaldness.





Once I finally found some materials I thought might be useful I proceeded to strip out the answer from the vortex. In this picture I still must remove the pipe with the elbow stuck in the inlet from the pond bottom right.



A neighbor was about to throw out his old washing machine and a quick peek at the drum made me realize this might just be the perfect starting point. With the necessary beer, cuts in the hands and accompanying swear words I stripped the drum out. As luck would have it another neighbor had a trailer parked out front on his way to the garbage tip. With a sweet smile on my part he not only agreed to take my left over washing machine parts but helped me carry it out as well.

So here you see the drum in it's full glory. Nice and shiny but with one major drawback... The bottom is solid. At first I considered drilling holes into the bottom or using an angle grinder to cut slots. Drilling holes into Stainless steel is tedious to say the least as the drills tend to get overheated quite quickly. Using an angle grinder overheats the metal and will cause it to rust. Secondly it creates whopping burred edges that are hard to remove and will slice your flesh like a razor. One little side note... I recently tried some new angle grinder disks designed for stainless steel. They are very thin to reduce heating the metal and contain no iron which reduces rust forming on the edge on the cut... Worth noting.




My Answer at this point was to replace the bottom of the drum with some perforated stainless I had in the shed. Using hacksaw blades in the jigsaw I cut our the bottom leaving only a small flange on the edge. The flange would serve as an attachment point for the new bottom and help maintain the rigidity or the drum.









With the bottom removed I then cut the perforated stainless to size with a pair of heavy duty tin snips (not for those of you with weak hands)



I then cut the central hole for the pipe to the next chamber of the filter. Because the strips of perforated stainless were too small I used two strips, aligned the holes and bolted them together.
Now it is simply a matter of drilling a few holes and bolting the stainless strips to the drum body.



Adding an air pipe on the bottom allows me to mix the kaldness and loosen trapped debris before flushing




And here we have the finished product installed and working

[math en peggy]

well, that's, something else than what i've seen so far. I think I can get an old washing machine, I sure could try this here

thanks for your instructions, they are very clear

[B.Scott]

An old washmachine drum was perhaps a bit over the top. You can use any sort of barrel, bin, drum or container.

I made a similar setup for my quatantine tank in the shed made from some large diameter PVC pipe that was left over from a job.




Instead of holes I cut slots using an angle grinder (sliptol voor jullie!)




















Likewise you don't need to be so fancy. As I said above any old container cab be used. Here are a couple if examples others have used...





B.Scott

[math en peggy]

I already tried it with a 200mm pvc pipe filled with 20 liters of k1, but this also clogged within an hour

today I'm going to rebuild my filter

in the old situation the bottomdrain goes into a 200 liter barrel then a 3 chamber filter, then the pump back in the pond and the skimmer seperately to the plant pond with a second pump back into the pond

new situation will be :
bottomdrain and skimmer together in a 500 liter barrel build as a vortex to the plantpond, where a pump pumps the water to the 3 chamber filter back in the koi pond

later this year I will add 4 more 500 liter barrels buils as a 4 chamber system to only the bottomdrain with a second pump

drawing:

[math en peggy]

after two days work, here are the pictures:

old situation:


temporary extra air:



temporary place for my filter:



the old 200 liter vortex and the new 500 liter:


losing water out the pond for improving bottomdrain:


new, botomdrain and skimmer coming together with valves to reduce the flow:


new vortex in place, on the right site you can see the pipe that goes to the plant pond:


from the other site, in the front, the new filter and in the background you can see first the koi pond and behind the plant pond:



the only thing I have to do is reconnected the 3 chamber filter between the pump in the plantpond and the koi pond, but I have to wait untill next thursday because my pvc supplier is out of 50 mm curves and pipe (I already bought everything he's got haha)

[math en peggy]

today I could finally finish the project

I made the 50mm pipe from the pump in the plantpond to the 3 chamberfilter and the outlet from the filter to the koi pond:

first picture, the pump:


then the 3 chamberfilter in its place:



in the left in the picture above you can see some bamboo I plant past week

here you can see all the pipe work there is: 110 pipe from bottomdrain and skimmer to the vortex, 110 to the plant pond, 50 coming back from the plantpond to the 3 chamberfilter and 110 from the filter to the koi pond


only thing I have to do is connecting the drains from the filter to a waste put

here a view from my lazy char, it all looks nice when it's all finished and cleaned up:


in the new situation I am only using one pump for the filtering, so the other pump now I am using that pump for a waterfall in the plantpond, there now is more flow and extra oxyging:

[math en peggy]

Hello

it has been a while sinse I posted here, since then our situation has changed a bit,

we have bought another house where we start all over with our pond

we bought the house last december (2007), the house needed alot of work.

two weeks ago I finished a little temporary pond to move my koi fast and save

the pond is 2 meter by 2 meters width and almost 2 meters deep.

I think we should be done with rebuilding the house wthin three weeks
after that I'm going to build a new pond with 20.000 liters of water, where the koi can live while I'm building a second pond that's going to be alot bigger, I'm thinking of 60.000 liters water

you can watch some pictures of the house and the small temporary ;pond VERBOUWING

soon I will update here with some pictures

[math en peggy]

well, now we era moved into the new house here are some pictures of the temporary pond and some picturs from the old pond when it was removed:











you can watch more pictures at the following link:WWW.MATHENPEGGY.NL

[math en peggy]

soon I will post pictures of the new pond we are going to build