Pond Skimmer and Pump Problems - Help!

[acleme1]

hello all. my wife and i recently bought a new house that has a large (2500 gallon) koi pond in the back yard. we absolutely LOVE it, but we've recently started having some problems with it. i was hoping someone here could help me out. here's what is going on...

my pond has a skimmer with a pump in it. the pump pushes water up to a waterfall about 30 feet away. lately, the skimmer has not been staying full, and the pump is pumping lots of air with the water in the bottom of the skimmer. the koi pond is plenty full of water, but it just seems like the pump is pumping faster than the skimmer can supply water. what could be going on?

another quick question: my pond is dirty, and i want to filter the water. my skimmer doesn't have a place for the filter material, and i want to put a bio filter into the waterfall. can i just stuff filter material in and around the inside of my skimmer, around the pump?

thanks so much for reading through this. kind regards, aaron.

[Jerry]

Welcome Aaron.  You will get some good answers also a few that look at it differently then I do.
Some better, some worse.
The filters in the skimmers i have seen are not great because the amount of filter media is small.
Clear water means good and plenty filter media.
here is what I and many of us use.  The media is super cheap and very effective.

http://www.koiclay.com/diy/pg1.htm
More responses soon, but this is a start!

[finnpond]

I agree with Jerry...  For a short term fix, you may want to put polyester batting in you waterfall where it enters your pond and rinse often.  Sounds like either the input to your skimmer is too small (what type is it?) (Pictures?) not allowing it to fill properly... Can you make it larger? Another solution would be to put a valve in the Pump to Waterfall fall line, close it down a notch, so that the pump is not draining your skimmer.  This would weaken the amount water going over your falls, of course.  Is the skimmer the only source of input into your pump?  Filling the skimmer with filter material seems like it would only exacerbate your problem.....

I made a "skippy"-type bio-filter out of garbage cans you can look at in my early pictures below, they work great... and are similar to the real Skippy, Jerry and many others here have built...

Dave

[acleme1]

thanks for the response guys. i talked with a guy this afternoon here in town (river city koi), and it looks like my skimmer is too small for my pump. i pulled the pump out, and it's a 3360 GPH pump with a 7' head. it's a stainless tsunami, i believe. so i have a great pump, and a small skimmer. their recommendation is to buy a larger skimmer. a big bahama, i believe.

in the meantime, i have decided to put a good bio media in the skimmer, and i put my mechanical sheet filter material in the waterfall above. putting the filter material in the waterfall also helps regulate the amount of water flowing through that big pump.

so far, so good. the skimmer is staying full, and it looks like a lot of debris is being caught by the filters in the waterfall. i know it's kinda bass akwards, but i'll just have to see how it does.

what do you guys think?is this a solution that might work?

thanks again for the input. aaron.

[finnpond]

Sounds like you are on your way!!!!!  Everybody does what they have to, to get them by...

I eventually got tired of pulling the pump from the skimmer and the continual cleaning ritual involved and went with an external Sequence pump...  Dug a hole lower than the skimmer (Savio) bottom, plumbed a pipe to the hole, dropped a box in the hole, installed the pump so that it was gravity fed/flooded suction, installed some ball valves,and hooked it up to my garbage can filters...  Much easier maintenance, lower power costs and it has been running 24/7/365 for 5+ years...  I've pulled it twice to clean impellers (frog ingestion!!) and that's it...  I have also now installed a large mesh screen around the Savio output, so I don't have the frog problem...

I would still recommend a biofilter to you and a good location is at your waterfall site...

Take Care...  Happy Fourth!!!