If you have a pond in your back yard, one of the most important things you need to do is to buy and install an appropriate pond filter. As their name implies, pond filters filter out a lot of the suspended particles that are present in your water, such as dead and decaying plant material. If you don’t filter out this material, it will use up all the oxygen in your pond and your fish will die.
The most common type of pond filter is an external filter. These filters sit outside of the water, and water from the pond is pumped through the pond filter media and back to the pond. These filters are great because you don’t have to go in the water to install or service them, and they tend to last longer because they are not in the water.
For more fancy type ponds with fountains, you need to buy a submersed filter. Such a filter will offer you biological filtration as well as mechanical and chemical filtration. However, having this type of filter may be a disadvantage, since in most cases you need to get into the pond if you need to fix the filter, or have access to it for other purposes such as cleaning. This not only obliges you to get wet but also disturbs the fish and plant life in the pond.
In brief, don’t buy a filter without consulting with a specialist first. Home and garden or pet stores that sell fish and the equipment for outdoor ponds should be able to give you sound advice. Hear what they have to say, once you’ve told them just how big your pond is and what type of vegetation and fish you have, the more precise the numbers the better.
For more tips on do-it-yourself home projects, including outdoor landscape lighting, check out home-and-gardens.net.
