Hello,
This is my first post here. It's a bit long winded because I'm waiting to for my work truck to get fixed.
Little bit of background about me. I've been keeping aquariums for 20+ years. I kept some goldfish in a 125 for over 10 years until the seal on the tank broke and I lost them all. I've since kept it as a low-tech planted tank for over 4 years. I just took a new job and moved from California to Eastern Washington. I've worked in microbiology, statistics, plant research, seed marketing, and now seed sales mostly for agriculture. You could say I'm sort of a jack of all trades when it comes to living things. I'm also the sort of guy that takes care of my car's myself, builds furniture for fun, and can DIY most anything to the house (after researching a bunch to make sure I do it right).
The house I just bought has around a 8,000 gallon koi pond installed. It has 4 lesser quality koi (2 male and 2 female around 18-20" in length"). It also has around 80 goldfish in the pond (2-6 years old from my estimation) and they appear to be successfully breeding. I think there is too many of them and plan to trade in 50 or 60 of them and aquire 10-12 respectable quality koi.
The issue happened the second night we after we purchased the place. The previous owner had installed a priming pot before two Sequence 4200SE12 pumsp below the bottom of the pond. The place is on a hill. He was pulling the water directly from two drains installed in the pond AND through the skimmer. He was also injecting air directly into the drain pipes??? He used the screen on the priming pots to remove the severe algae problem the pond has.
Due to constant opening for cleaning of the priming pot, the plactic lid wore out and failed the second day after I purchased the house. This leaked into the box and drowned the pumps. The first I knew about it was when I investigated why the waterfall wasn't running. The GFCI had tripped (installed correctly thank goodness). Please insert image of me at midnight using my cell phone as a flashlight scooping out water with a plastic cup.
I dismantled and tried to dry everything out but the pumps still blows the GFCI when I plug it in. I plan on setting it up without the priming pot and only feed the water from the skimmer. If I can get the pump dried out and stop blowing the GFCI fuse. Any suggestions on what I should do? Are the pumps toast?
