Hi all

Can anyone recommend a pond filter/pump for under £300 ,i've been thinking of the oase but they are expensive.I will have a mixture of fish and Plants ,it has no bottom drain ,it's also 625 Gallon .Am hopeing to keep a few Koi not many orfe and tench

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Get yourself down to wicks and build your own. 2000 gallons i keep clean with two 40 gallon cold water tanks linked together. Then i bought the filter material from a garden center, it looks like a load of plastic hair curlers. One 't piece' tap connection from the pump to regulate the flow of water into the tanks. The reason for that is i have an ordinary 35 quid sump pump that really does shift some water. Good luck.

I agree with Barry, those cold water tanks are brilliant for filters, and a fraction of the price of buying one someone else has adapted.

Shame you can't have a bottom drain, filling the filters by gravity and pumping the clean water back into the pond makes a massive difference to how often the pump needs cleaning (i.e. almost never). If you are going to run the pump submerged in the pond, make sure you choose a pump with a decent solids handling capacity so that it doesn't block up easily. The high flow/low pressure pumps are good for this, so long as you don't need to pump to a very high head.

Hello Steve, i made a tube out of strong perferated plastic and lobed the pump into that to act as a prefilter, result is i don't remember when the pump last stopped or when i had to clean it.

Cheers Barry ,just looked on tinternet for some cold water tanks and it's come up with lots all different sizes etc .Any more information it would be greatly appreciated .This is my first pond some am a complete novice.




I know built the pond already tho .I've read somewhere that a retro drain is worth thinking about tho .You had any experience with these Steve?

No, had to google to see what one was. I can see the benefit of them for keeping the bottom clean, but to me that's a secondary benefit of a bottom drain - the main benefit being the gravity feed to the filters.

Hiyer Chris when you look at the tanks on the internet do they not give you an idea as to the size of the pond they are intended for or the amount of water that they will cope with. Me i would always get a larger size than what they recommend, this is the advantage also of building your own. If not can you go to a garden center or an aquatic shop that sells them, i'm sure that would give you the information that you require. Have a good look at how they are put together and what material is used as the local diy stores will stock it at a considerable saving. The only other material required is the fillter medium, as said some of it looks just like hair curlers.

Steve's Rules Of Pond Filtration

1. It can't be too big
2. See 1.



The best pond I ever built was for my folks. That was 9'x18'x5' and was filtered by cold water expansion tanks. We used two sizes, I think the smaller one was 40 gallons. The larger one had a metal reinforcement around the collar. Can't seem to find pictures of them online now, so they may have been superseded. You may be able to find other water tanks on the web now, be a bit creative. Anyway, we fed the bottom drain by gravity into a smaller tank which we filled with brushes. That was gravity fed into a larger tank, also filled with brushes. A pump in the second tank pumped the water up to the top of the garden via a UV unit into another of the smaller tanks, full of brushes. That drained into a large tank which was full of Flocor and gravel. That then ran out into a shallow pond, something like a 5' radius quarter circle with about six inches of gravel and an inch of water on top. That was full of reeds and watercress. Then back into the pond via a stream.



Worked brilliantly - wasn't originally designed like that, it originally consisted of the two tanks and the reed bed at the top fed by a pump in the pond. That worked fine, but when we doubled the size of the pond, we put in the bottom drain and the two gravity fed chambers of brushes. I can't praise brushes enough for ease of cleaning - they give you really good solids removal, they don't block and they also provide a large surface area for biological filtration. If you design the chamber they sit in so that you can isolate it, give them a good shake and then drain it, you make removing unwanted solids really easy. Just a matter of putting a drain in the bottom of the chamber and either a tap or a simple standpipe to empty it.

If you can find room for a vegetable filter (the shallow pond full of rushes and watercress) make sure you do it. It makes a hell of a difference to the growth of filamentous algae (blanketweed) by sucking all the nitrates and phosphates out of the water. Also gives you more watercress than you know what to do with!