how often to clean koi pond bottom

A question we get asked all the time is how do you clean out your pond, and keep the water clean and clear.

The answer is…

It depends.

Read on.

Koi ponds by their very nature are dirty places. Fish load, the corporeality of food yous feed your fish, and the surrounding area all give ascension to dirty pond h2o.

Some of the points we are going to cover today that effects pond cleaning is as follows:

How the pond is prepare?
How do you remove debris and sludge from the lesser of the pond and is in that location a mode for you to drain the water?
Is information technology a new pond?
How many fish are you stocking, and what blazon?
Where is information technology positioned in the garden – very important this i…

These questions are just a few that we need answers to earlier nosotros can come up up with a plan for getting you that crystal clear expect you lot e'er wanted in your koi swimming so you can admire your fish all yr round.

Ane thing for certain though is no matter what, nosotros would never recommend fully draining your pond when cleaning it unless you have suffered a catastrophic failure or contaminated the water beyond repair.

How oft exercise you have to make clean a koi pond?

If you accept everything set correctly y'all should never really have too much piece of work to exercise with cleaning your pond to go along the fish happy and the pond clean.

Let's consider an ideal scenario where yous planned everything out from the very offset and congenital the platonic swimming.

First upwardly you would have installed an aerated lesser bleed and a gradually sloping base of operations in your pond to remove all the waste matter and muck from the lesser of the pond.
Next, you lot would have installed a skimmer to remove any surface debris and keep a overnice polished wait on the surface of the water.
Y'all would have installed some mid-depth TPR's in the walls of your koi pond – that is at to the lowest degree three pes deep to help apportionment.
You lot would accept a pump strong enough to completely turn the water over in the pond every hour.
A multi-stage filtration arrangement for mechanical and biological filtration.
A UV clarifier to keep dark-green algae at bay, continued via a hose back to your filter.
Finally, a bog-filter to filter fine particles and nutrients from the h2o before it is returned to the pond.

Come across, that's not how life works.

Well-nigh of us when we go around to building our first pond dig a hole, throw in a liner – either rubber, PVC, or solid plastic liner, fill information technology h2o, and chuck in a few fish. A week goes past and and then because information technology looks then not bad you lot go and buy another scattering of fish and in they become too.

Another few weeks become by and your lovely clean pond h2o is not so clean anymore.

At this point, people start to panic and head off to the shops and buy all sorts of chemicals to clear up the h2o. The reality is all ponds suffer from what'southward usually known as 'new pond' syndrome.

This is where your gin-articulate water turns a squeamish shade of green. Y'all can no longer see your new koi or fish because the greenish mirky water is everywhere.

So what should you do?

First up – don't panic.

This transition is perfectly natural and happens to every new swimming.

The society of where we would get-go goes like this.

Pump – Keep your water moving

Priority number one on whatever swimming is to circulate the water and keep information technology moving. Still water goes stagnant and will kill your fish.

On pocket-sized ponds, you often see a small in-pond fountain splashing on the surface. While not the best matter for keeping your swimming clean – information technology's better than nothing.

Nosotros will too add together aeration to this section. Adding air to your water helps a huge amount in the overall health and condition of your pond. Having aerated h2o is smashing for your fish and keeps everything in the koi pond moving.

You lot may do this with a pump-fed waterfall of fifty-fifty by calculation a pocket-sized air pump and some airstones to the swimming or if y'all are lucky plenty to have installed an aerated lesser drain.

Filtration – Removal of waste

The outset thing we always look at is filtration. How are you removing the fish poop and muck from the swimming? If you don't take a lesser drain that gravity feeds your filtration and then y'all are most likely using a pump to get the water from the pond into a filter.

The filter itself needs to exist big enough to cope with the waste matter load from the swimming and starting out people either make their own from YouTube videos or buy a purposed built filter.

Both have their merits and both tin can practise a perfect job if they are prepare correctly.

A pond filter is the best mode to go along your koi pond clean. Koi produce lots of waste and a adept filter will house enough bacteria to remove most of the waste from your water and proceed things counterbalanced. Read more about my DIY pond filter.

Plants act every bit natural filters and also reduce nasty chemicals and amend water quality.

Beneficial Leaner

All ponds are full of bacteria – both good and bad.

On a new pond, you lot will need to jump-showtime the filter to get it performing properly. Adding some benign bacteria at this stage is the correct matter to do. It's this bacteria that helps remove the nasties from the water. Koi produce ammonia. Expressionless and decaying waste on the bottom of your pond also produces ammonia. The breakdown of this ammonia causes nitrites in your pond.

Adding benign leaner to your swimming consumes these nitrites and helps keep your pond balanced.

We are not big fans of removing lots of your water from the swimming but if you lot are suffering from high nitrite levels then the just way to combat this is to perform a 25% water change with de-chlorinated h2o.

Pond Skimmer – Surface Debris Removal

If you think about your koi fish pond for a 2nd. Everything that goes into the pond has to enter via the water'due south surface so it's a great place to showtime when it comes to cleaning information technology.

A pond skimmer volition save you a lot of fourth dimension in the long run, aid keep it clean, and really cut down on overall pond maintenance.

Put it some other way – if you tin can catch whatever droppings that enters your pond before it sinks to the bottom will save you all sorts of work later on trying to get it dorsum out again.

Depending on where y'all located your pond you are inevitably going to end up with leaves, twigs, and other unwanted rubbish in the pond water. A skimmer will help remove this before it sinks to the bottom and starts to rot away.

There are iii chief types of skimmers for pond cleaning.

Skimmer Box

A wall-mounted skimmer box that is plumbed into your overall arrangement sucks water from the surface of the pond and off into your filters for cleaning. These types of skimmers accept a removable basket that collects all the leaves and dead bugs etc for handy removal.

The downside of these is they crave a flake of planning before y'all build your koi pond.

Floating Skimmer

If your pond is already up and running and yous don't have the option for a wall-mounted skimmer, then you could opt for a floating skimmer or submerged surface skimmer. Both of these options are easy to fix up later your pond is completed as an add-on.

Both these skimmers can be added using a separate pump that pulls water from the surface of the water downwards through the skimmer and simply returned back to the swimming. Null as well complicated about this setup. They are designed to just remove surface floating debris from your pond.

A terminal note on skimmers is to make certain that if you lot accept floating plants in the swimming so split up them from each other. They will actually aid clean the pond but will suck up anything floating on the surface of the water.

The final option you could use here is to invest in a decent pond net. Go for one that's sturdy but with a fine enough net mesh to help remove smaller $.25 from the pond.

UV Lite – Remove Green Algae.

We mentioned green water earlier when discussing new pond syndrome. No amount of cleaning or scrubbing will remove algae from the h2o. A neat way to combat this problem is to pump the water through an ultraviolet clarifier that will kill off the cells that crusade this light-green water. These microscopic cells multiple very quickly and it may seem like your pond turns green overnight.

The algae itself causes zero harm to your koi swimming- if anything the fish like it considering it provides cover so they can swim well-nigh without anybody seeing them – simply that's the problem – y'all tin can't run into your fish.

adding a UV clarifier to your pond volition help reduce green algae

Algae blooms happen all the time and autonomously from when your pond is new, it'due south a certain sign that the water balance is off somewhere. This may be because of besides much straight sunlight or an abundance of actress nutrients in the h2o.

If your pond is in full sunlight then a good method to combat algae growth is to introduce some plants. If you want to remove larger free-floating clumps of algae then i step would be to cyberspace this out of the water.

Both floating plants like h2o lettuce and using potted plants like Lillies and Iris will provide shade from the dominicus, giving your fish somewhere to hide, plus they eat the backlog nutrients and bad bacteria from the h2o. Plants are piece of cake to manage, natural filters, and as long as you go along them in check they are the all-time method to brand healthy happy koi ponds.

Everything mentioned to a higher place is either a natural or manufactured procedure to clean your swimming. Y'all may think that draining your koi swimming is the only way to keep it clean, but koi ponds, in general, are never 100% clean, but that's why they work.

How do yous clean a koi pond without draining information technology?

With the correct setup, you can manage and maintain a clean healthy pond without ever draining it out. The reality is if you exercise drain it you are nearly starting again considering you will kill off any beneficial bacteria growing in the pond that is helping to maintain the ecosystem and remainder of life.

A koi pond takes fourth dimension to mature, the pond h2o needs to cycle and the bacteria need to abound in your filter system. Make sure you allow things settle downwards, go the pump menstruum through the filter organization tuned, and add in a skimmer for surface cleaning.

How exercise you clean a pond without killing the fish?

Cleaning your pond involves a bit of work. Y'all need to remove as much sludge from the bottom of the pond as you tin using natural options like a cyberspace or pond vacuum. Avoid draining information technology at all costs. Put the endeavour in and use natural elbow grease instead of harsh chemicals

Yous should clean your pond whenever necessary only as mentioned the best fourth dimension to practice it is the end of autumn to go it and the fish prepare for the winter, or when things heat up a flake in the spring and the fish beginning moving about once again looking for food.

When should I clean my pond?

Work out a maintenance programme and aim to practice your major cleaning either at the start of jump when the water starts to oestrus up again and the koi become agile, or towards the terminate of fall when things start to slow down once again.

Make certain everything is washed before winter sets in considering the koi will slow down, and your plants will dice back. Accept equally much sludge out of your koi swimming by cleaning the bottom debris and expressionless plants – you might have access to, or invest in a swimming vacuum to make clean the swimming or big fine cyberspace at this stage to help with maintenance and debris removal.

Whatever yous practise, once winter sets in, leave your ponds alone. The combination of common cold and reduced allowed systems in your koi means they volition not recover from a shock if yous drain the water in the pond or perform a large water alter. Fish need niggling or no food once the temperature in your ponds drops below 10 degrees so it'southward a skilful time to leave everything lonely.

fish will stay in deeper water when winter sets in and ponds freeze over.

If you have a bottom drain and then turn off the pump and flush the arrangement out with a hose if you want to remove any large debris and settled sludge from the pipes. Become rid of the last of the sludge with a internet on a long pole.

Put your plants in place at the everyman function of the pond to protect them from the common cold.

When winter kicks in y'all will be glad you lot made the effort to make clean the koi pond. Removing all that sludge improves the overall quality of the pond water and reduces the risk on your koi when h2o temperatures drop or the swimming freezes over.

At whatever phase, during the year yous should clean away and trim dorsum overgrown leaf and surface plants so you lot can view and admire your koi or other fish.

Scoop out the sludge whenever you notice a buildup in the bottom of your pond or after an algae bloom has died off

How do I make my pond water clear naturally?

If you want a natural pond and do non want to use any bogus cleaning methods so y'all could utilise a natural bog filter to remove droppings waste material from the pond. The bog filter acts as a cleaning sieve and will improve water quality over time. You pump the water from the fish pond upwardly via a hose into the bog and allow it flow up through a bed of gravels that remove small particles and floating sludge from the water. Once you introduce plants to this type of filter they will thrive and produce strong root systems that remove waste matter and are very beneficial to your pond.

One time they become established around ponds they provide a haven from good bacteria, need fiddling or no maintenance, and can drastically improve your water quality.

A good bog filter has many benefits and one time in place and established ane may provide better filtration than any manufactured solution on the market place.

They exercise take a while to become established and then a first step may be to use a biological filter while the plants take to the conditions.