Water Gardening: Post Dramatic Pond Disorder, 0 by BogweedBuck

BogweedBuck wrote:
Yeah, man! Have a picture of your pond? It sounds nice by the way you describe it.

How tall is the stone work for your waterfall? My last pond had a very small waterfall-like feature that was just big enough for me to hide my UV unit behind.

As far as a biological filter is concerned, if your waterfall is tall enough, that's a great place to tuck this behind as well. If not, which was my case last year, moderately tall grasses serve that purpose all too well. I had some grasses that needed to be divided anyhow, one large clump was used to disguise my homebrew bio filter. Here's how my hook-up worked:

- One pump was used for my mini waterfall. I had one of those submersible type filters to catch the larger detritus. Everytime that filter started getting full of gunk, the waterfall rate of flow was visibly affected. At least it was painfully clear when it was time to clean that one! :o)

- Another pump was used to drive the bio and UV filters. There was also a rough "pre filter" attached to the intake of this pump as well. It was a bit more crude and less efficient than the other one, but it kept baby fish and larger debris out of the loop. Above water I had a "T" fitting in place with a ball valve installed beyond the "T". It really doesn't much matter which line the ball valve is placed on: less flow on that line diverts more water to the other. My goal here was to make sure that my UV unit ALWAYS had water flowing through it. Let it dry up and it's burn-out time.

Here's one of those "T" inserts: