An Eco-Friendly Environment and Cost Savings: Building a Pond Filter
What sort of a filter do you need for your water garden pond? How large does it need to be, and how clean does your little ecosystem need to be kept? These are decisions you need to make when you build a water garden in your yard. It isn’t just a matter of putting in a liner and a pump, and sitting back to look at your little pond. You want water plants and possibly fish to live in the little habitat you’re building to make it both beautiful and inviting. Never think of what you’re building as only a hole in your back yard, but realize it for what it is – an eco-system. Adding a pond filter will allow you to keep your system clean, and it isn’t going to cost you half as much as it would to buy commercial filters.
You should initiate the project by measuring the area of the pond. You can make use of a rope for this purpose. You must know how much area you will be required to filter so that you be sure your filter will be able to take care of the job. One way you can lessen the requirement for filtering is by adding waterfalls and streams to your system. These will assist in moving the water around naturally through the system as well as force it through the filters. A water garden is definitely a delicately-balanced system that requires all of its component parts in order to maintain the health of the plants and animals living there. You need a way to eliminate the impurities that can destroy the environment and encourage the creation of good bacteria that rid the pond of fish waste and organic debris.
There are a couple of types 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 create your own filter, you can start with nothing but a good-sized plastic pot, mesh bags, large lava rocks, and a submersible pond pump. Fill the mesh bags with lava rocks, taking care not to overfill them. Sit the pump in the bottom of your plastic container, run the tubing and cords, set the lava rocks in the container, and you’ll have a basic but effective pond filter.