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  1. #1
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    How many drains / drums?

    Hi.

    looking for some guidance on my next pond at our new(ish) house. Been here 2 and a bit years and the fish are still in a temporary location as we had a full on flood shortly after moving in and we’ve only just got everything else back together.

    trying to plan well in advance, so here goes...

    currently ive marked out an area in the garden where the pond will go as part of the overall garden design. I can’t still work out if the proportions are right so I’m going to try and get an aerial picture tomorrow in the daylight.

    the area I have is a rough circle, 9 metres in diameter. Assuming a 1.75m depth for near on 6 feet, that’s 111,000 litres, about 24,000 gallons.... which is a lot.. that’s lead me to wonder about drums, in so far as I think that would require 2 of the buggers! So first question, suppose we reduce to 1.33m (approx 4 feet) depth, that gives about 87,000 litres. Could I get away with a single Queni 65 drum for that?

    second question is, how many drains and what layout do you use for a circular pond?

    also when considering volume, this is obviously without filters and the waterfall / rill that I want to put in...

    thoughts?

    thanks



  2. #2
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai Skoosh88's Avatar
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    That’s not a pond it’s a bloody lake!!How many drains / drums?


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  3. #3
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    I keep thinking that, perhaps someone can check my math?

    4.5m radius

    Pi r2 x depth is what I used which gave 111 cubic metres when using a depth of 1.75?

  4. #4
    Correct
    110k litres, 24k gallons or thereabouts.
    It’s not only the cost of the initial gear you’ll have to consider it’s the ongoing cost of things like your water changes/trickle especially if you’re on a meter.
    Then there’s possible future treatments and trying to catch fish that need attention.
    I think 4 feet deep would leave your fish extremely vulnerable to predators and they’d be a bit chilly come the winter...then if you want to heat...yowser, into big heat pump territory. You could maybe have a shallow area with a deeper “refuge” area perhaps?
    Whilst a large pond is probably what everyone wants in reality a more modest size would be appropriate?
    You could run 2 drums instead of 1 massive one...probably a better idea.
    If one fails then you’d have something working.
    See the video Feline posted last week for inspiration.
    Mind you...would be pretty pukka to have a humongous pond and sod the money How many drains / drums?How many drains / drums?



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  6. #5
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    I only looked at 4 feet depth just to see what difference it makes in volume. I think it would seem that 2 drums is a safer bet even though it is a premium over 1 large one.

    Trickle in/out is a fair point, but i’ll probably live with that. We don’t pay for any waste water here as there is no mains sewage, so our costs are less than many. In addition I will retain the trickle out into the rainwater harvesting tank for garden irrigation purposes. I’m trying to be as green as we can, we have ground source heating in the house and I’m just waiting for 24kw of solar pv planning approval to help with electricity costs.

    heating did cross my mind, it would be air source heat pump if I were to install. My last pond was heated from the house central heating using a pool heat exchanger but there’s no option for that here, mostly because the pond will be too far from the house but also because the green incentives for the ground source prohibit the heating of anything but the main house.

    as I said, not sure with the proportions yet, I have some sketches of layout that I’m working on for landscaping the garden but I’m actually finding it really difficult with the large space that we have. I was plotting a more typical pond size where I wanted it in the garden and it looked completely lost! Hence the exercise with the garden hose! I’ll try to get a picture from above and also the sketches.

    anyone have any info on the scavenging area of a bottom drain?

    might be worth going for a variable depth to reduce the gallonage a tad, we shall see.

  7. #6
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    Oh, meant to say, for treatments I’d propbably move the fish to a quarantine tank which can be heated.

    and yeah, catching a fish.... ��

  8. #7
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai Handy Kenny's Avatar
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    GadgetBazza,

    My own pond/filter is around 20,000 litres and 7.5 feet at the deep end which is 8 feet across. The pond starts off at 2 feet wide and 18 inches deep and stretches around 25 feet along a new boundary wall that I built. It is a bit like a Chinese spoon. Did I completely plan the finished article, no I had the outline in my head and got into a digger, got out of the digger when it looked right and the pile of excavated soil looked big! The dimensions however do give the pond scale from the side that it is viewed from, a 10-12 foot square box would have been lost in my garden and quite frankly probably out of place. I chose the shape to allow me plenty of garden space to do other things like put up a 9m x 3m gazebo for barbecues etc alongside the pond. Your garden is an important space, don't just fill it with pond. Think about turning your garden into large rooms with different vistas etc. A real garden designer is probably worth his weight in gold if only to get your head around initial ideas.

    Kenny

  9. #8
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    Hi kenny,

    thanks for that. Agreed about garden design. We’ve already had one designer in (Chelsea gardens gold award winner or something and build costs to go with it!). To be honest I needed someone to take some of the things we wanted to include and bring all the space we have into play as I kept placing everything in the same part of the garden.

    weve got a bit of a hybrid of that design and features that we would like to add in mind currently, I don’t want to rush the project so will probably get some more design work done before anyone with diggers is involved. That said I appreciate the view that things can change as you go. Having just had the whole house refurbished from the basement to the upstairs I know just how many options come up along the way. It’s a major task, glad I never went down the route of building our own place from scratch, it would have finished me!

    im already pondering how I can section the garden a little more and reduce the pond size. Currently the section is very large and lends itself to the large pond size, so maybe that’s what needs to be addressed.

  10. #9
    How about a big anoxic pond planted with some lovely plants flowing into a “clean” koi pond in a kind of yingyang shape?
    2 for the price of 1 How many drains / drums?
    (You can tell I’m no garden designer)
    With that amount of space available you could really achieve some rather special whatever you do. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with though so good luck and get some pictures up


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  11. #10
    Extreme Koi Member Rank = Supreme Champion Davej's Avatar
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    All does depend what you want for the pond and from Koi.

    9M in diameter creates problems in terms of catching / caring the fish.

    20,000+ gallons is expensive to heat, a pond of 5,000gallons that was heated would be my choice over a 20,000 gallon pond any day, but that is just where the personal preferences for what we want from Koi come in.

    Budget wise £60-£80k would seem the sort of range that may be needed for a 9m pond, and if you are stocking it with reasonable Koi that fit with such an impressive structure maybe allow £150k for stock? All in all a considerable investment so very careful planning would be needed as well as a real enthusiasm for Koi.

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  13. #11
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    Thanks for the reply chaps...

    I am thinking of a waterfall / rill feature and have thought about adding an anoxic area within this, all still pie in the sky at the moment.

    I've attached a drawing which will hopefully help. It's a 3d drawing of the house and main plot + garden, but we also have a large field beyond this. The line that separates this in the drawing is only one that identifies a virtual boundary for building rights, we can use whatever we want with regards to landscaping, but the space we have is huge without eating into the field.

    I've drawn the pond as a perfect circle (added the garden bits quickly this evening), but in truth it will be more naturally shaped, but it's easier to draw the circle for rough shapes etc. Attached to this we want to put a circlar (ish) deck area with a slight overhang for viewing. I am also planing on exposing the lower level of the pond to facilitate a below ground window in what would be the top right quadrant in that picture facing the kitchen, dining room and balcony areas.

    All the pond spoil will be used to create a banked area to the left of the pond to add some contour to the garden as it's very flat as it is. In here I am thinking of a feature waterfall and planting the area up.

    With regards to filter room location, two options on the table at the moment are either a sunken room at the back of the banked area to the left or towards the side garden. One other option might be below the deck area.

    We will look to put a breeze house / gazebo building out by the deck, again just nicked a pre-made gazebo building off of Sketchup for speed, but we have seen something more in keeping with the circle theme.

    The house has lots of square edges and all hard surfaced up to the edge of the property and we want to soften this, so we are planning some flower beds against the retaining wall for the basement (will keep kids away from the edge too) and a couple of flower beds to move the paving away from the edge of the house somewhat...

    In the drawing, I've made the pond circle 8m diameter now, assuming a perfect cylinder shape, this puts the volume at...

    1.50m / 5' deep = 75.4m3 = 16,585 gals
    1.80m / 6' deep = 90.5m3 = 19,907 gals

    Obviously there is a lot to think about in terms of the whole landscaping, not just the pond, but I wanted to clarify the volume I was potentially looking at.

    Does anyone have any information / links on bottom drain draw area?


    Screenshot 2018-09-19 21.45.29.png

  14. #12
    It’s around 12’ diameter I believe


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  16. #13
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    So probably 4 drains and a couple of skimmers? Split evenly into two drums, run one through a moving bed bio and the other through a shower?

    am I right in thinking the bio is better sized on the amount of feed you want to process rather than volume of water?

  17. #14
    I would have to draw it out to avoid dead spots.
    The pond Feline posted the video of ran basically 2 of everything
    Drum - 1000l K1
    Drum - 1000l K1
    Both pumped over one massive shower then returning to the pond at just below surface level.
    2 showers would achieve the same thing I would have thought
    You can work out the amount of feed you need for the amount of fish then see how much K1 you need to process that. I think the figures are on the EA website.
    The shower will probably be as big as you can afford to go I guess.





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  18. #15
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    Hi all, is there a best practices guide to the ratio of anoxic pond space for a given volume of pond water?

  19. #16
    Anoxic Filtration



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  20. #17
    Moderator Rank = Supreme Champion Feline's Avatar
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    I reckon you would need to be looking at 4 BDs minimum, and probably 3-4 drums too if youre serious about keeping koi to a high standard in it. Bear in mind that you need to be able to turn the whole pond volume over in 1-2 hours, and you may well not get the flow up to the advertised maximum of a drum (its best to allow some redundant capacilty in your plans just in case).

    There are people who go for a lake of that kind of size but dont try to stock or filter it like a standard ‘koi pond’. You would probably have to accept that you would lose fish from time to time because of the difficulty of netting and treating them. You would need extremely deep pockets for any treatments anyway.

  21. #18
    Extreme Koi Member Rank = Kyusai 1meterchag's Avatar
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    Rule of thumb is one bottom and one skimmer per 4000gallons!!

    Alex

  22. #19
    Senior Member Rank = Nanasai GadgetBazza's Avatar
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    Ok, so assuming I can stay at 16k gallons, 4 drains and 4 skimmers into 2 drums each with bio and then over a large shower sounds like the start point.

    I cant see why I would need 4 drums, 2 larger drums (50k Lph flow) should have plenty of capacity for a once per hour turnover. Whilst I accept that some drums might not reach their advertised flow, I can only see that this is either down to underperforming items (poorly designed / falsely advertised), which need to be avoided or too much restriction on the feed or return of the water from the drum.

    i am going to look into the anoxic piece though and consider breaking the pond down into separate pools set into the banking which will hopefully reduce the size of the final pond which would be the only one with koi in it.

    thanks all for the responses.

  23. #20
    Not enough drains??



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