A Clean Environment at a Lower Price: Building a Pond Filter
What type of a filter do you need for your water garden pond? What size does it need to be, and how clean does your small water world need to be kept? These are questions to ask yourself when you install a water garden in your yard. It isn’t just a matter of adding a liner and a pump, and sitting back to observe your little pond. You want growing plants and possibly fish to live in the little habitat you’re creating to make it both lovely and inviting. Don’t think of what you’re building as merely a hole in your back yard, but accept it for what it is – an eco-system. Building a pond filter will help you keep your system clean, and it isn’t going to cost you nearly as much as it would to buy commercial filters.
You need to start out by measuring the area of the pond. You can use a rope for this purpose. You must know how much area you have to filter so that you relax knowing your filter will be able to do the job. One way you can lower the need for filtering is by adding waterfalls and streams to your system. These will keep moving the water around naturally through the system as well as force it into the filters. A water garden is definitely a delicately-balanced system that must have all of its component parts in order to provide for the health of the plants and animals living within it. You must have a way to eliminate the impurities that can destroy the environment and encourage the generation of good bacteria that rid the pond of fish waste and organic materials.
There are a couple of kinds of filters you can use to help you develop the most optimum pond environment. A mechanical filter will collect debris and contaminants. A bacterial filter, on the other hand, will break contaminants down into materials that the plants and fish can use. To build your own filter, you can start with just a big plastic pot, mesh bags, large lava rocks, and a submersible pond pump. Fill the mesh bags with lava rocks, being careful not to fill them too full. Put the pump in the bottom of your plastic container, run the tubing and cords, stick the lava rocks in the container, and you’ll have a simple but effective pond filter.