In today's episode, we're going to talk about UV filter placement,
moving bed filter technology, and ponds gone wrong.
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So we're going to start off with the first question, is,
I get asked this quite a bit.
Do I want to put that UV filter before mechanical filtration or
after mechanical filtration.
And this is what I'll tell you.
I've done a lot of studying on this, I've listened to a lot of sales
pitches on this, about UV placement, and
you're going to hear stuff like, you take this little microscopic algae,
and it's going through the UV, and then it gets a sunburn.
And then, so imagine like the skin gets all coagulated, and
then you have millions of them travelling through and
they start to coagulate and get sticky, and they clump together,
and then they get caught in the biofilter.
And I've heard that over and over and I have to laugh at it because it
just doesn't make sense to me because when you put the UV filter
on the pond, it usually takes three to five days or seven days for
the UV to really kick in, and that the suspended UV cells, or
the algae cells that are traveling through start to disappear.
And whether they're falling out in suspension in the pond or
they're getting trapped in a bio mechanical filter.
Either through a waterfall filter or a you know some kind of bead filter.
It just takes some time.
It doesn't happen just one single time goes through.
Gets burnt.
Coagulated boom gets trapped.
I'll tell you this.
I always put my UV after.
I don't want to say always cause sometimes there's rare cases where I
change stuff up but most of the time you're going to find us installing
a UV filter after mechanical filtration.
And usually in my designs,
I have a final mechanical filtration past that, even.
But usually, it's going to be after, and this is why.
You want to trap as much solids and debris and fish poo and
all that stuff, you want to capture as much as possible
your mechanical filtration and send clear water into that UV.
You don't want to send any particulate.
I've seen ponds, for example,
where the UV is here, mechanical filtration's here, skimmer's here.
And they use a submersible pump, a rock falls in,
the rock comes up the line, shatters the quartz sleeve inside the UV,
breaks it burns the motor up I mean it's a mess.
So if that UV would have been put after the mechanical filtration
the rock would have went in.
Came through got caught got trapped in the mechanical filtration and
then you would have clear water going to the UV and
you wouldn't have a problem replacing the whole UV filter.
So I want to clear as much before I get in there and
send it back to the pond, and then wherever the algae,
the dead algae ends up, it ends up.
It's going to get caught in the mechanical filtration eventually, so
there's my answer to that.
Okay, let's move on to this one.
I have, I'm working with a guy named Brian Foster from Portland, Oregon,
and he sends me a really good question.
The question is, he says, Eric,
I want to use the Helix Pond Skimmer and the Moving Bed Waterfall Filter,
the set it and forget it filter, and I want to put that on my pond.
Is that all I need, or do I need mechanical filtration as well?
It's a perfect question because a lot of people don't understand
the Moving Bed Filter technology yet.
The Moving Bed when I say set it and forget it, in a waterfall situation,
it has to be high flow.
High flow water, high flow air, it doesn't allow much of anything
the sediment to have settle out outside the waterfall filters.
So if any debris should get to that filter,
it's going to get pushed up and back into the pond and
then have to end up in a mechanical filter at some point.
So the moving bed filter technology is just, imagine like a honey
comb of plastic, and it's tumbling around inside the waterfall.
And as water passes through there, ammonia gets broken down and
it's converted so it's not poisonous to the fish anymore.
And that's what the filter is for.
So you have to have some kind of mechanical filtration
as well in the system.
Otherwise, your pond's going to have a lot of sediment and
debris floating around in there.
So, I got to tell you,
when we brought the Moving Bed Waterfall technology to the table,
we brought it because we had a lot of ponds that had good skimming.
They had good water fall.
They had good aeration.
They had plenty of mechanical filtration, had to be cleaned a lot,
but there were a lot of fish in the pond.
And so the pond was going through these weird cycles.
We brought moving bed waterfall technology to the table.
I didn't need more mechanical or anything else.
I didn't need more skimming.
All I needed was that good bio activity, throw the moving
bed waterfall filter onto the side of the already-existing pond, and
boom, it solves that problem having ammonia spikes in the pond.
So we brought it as an aftermarket piece.
Now we do have today a biomechanical reactor, which is below the moving
bed technology of the waterfall we have a place to trap solids as well.
We have air assist cycle on that as well.
But, to answer your question, Brian, no,
you have to have a mechanical filter on the pond as well.
I hope I explained that well enough.
Let's go to ponds gone wrong.
This is a good one for me, because my producer and
I, the very first video we ever shot was a ponds gone wrong video.
I think it was probably 2006.
I'd have to look that up, but if you haven't seen our original ponds
gone wrong video, here's a link right here I'm going to give you
hit this link and go watch our original Ponds Gone Wrong.
You could see how we were all over the place because
we didn't know what the heck we were doing yet.
But it kind of brought us to where we're at today.
So that's enough about the history of Ponds Gone Wrong.
But I'll tell you this, I get people asking me all the time,
hey I built my pond, it's a total wreck,
it's definitely a Ponds Gone Wrong, will you come out to my facility or
will you come out to my place and film a rebuild.
And I want to explain to everyone what Ponds Gone Wrong means to me,
and what it did when we first started.
We found a pond, lots of ponds that were installed professionally and
done completely wrong, just a total mess.
The original Ponds Gone Wrong that we did the contractor got paid
two different times, I can't believe the homeowner
paid the contractor twice to build the pond.
Don't ask the story, you'll have to go see the video if you want to know
the full story on that, but
the contractor was paid, he delivered a product that just didn't
fulfill the needs of the whole system, it didn't work right and so
with ponds gone wrong has always mean my mentality like that.
If you're a do it yourself and you build a pond, and it goes wrong,
I kind of chalk that off as, a, you're learning in the hobby.
It's an experience, and hopefully you're having fun along the way.
And you're getting frustrated and
you're overcoming those frustrations by changing things.
But that's part of the hobby.
It's much different when you pay someone.
Your good, hard earned money to build you something,
a lifestyle of a pond, and it doesn't go right.
So that's where the whole ponds gone wrong thing comes from.
It's really contractor failure.
And the best of the best are going to screw up.
I know a lot of great contractors, and we all screw up at some point.
We all might have a leak.
We all might have a low edge or maybe we put a pump in and
plumbing, I don't know, everyone has a bad day.
Something gets screwed up, but the fact is if you get back in there,
and you get on and you get it fixed and repaired and
you solve all the problems, then that's okay.
But when you deliver a horrible product and you walk away or
you lie to the customer and say hey I do ponds all the time, and
then it's obvious that you don't.
That's in our episode two, Ponds Gone Wrong.
And that's where I sit on that.
So if you did it yourself, I'm not going to shoot a Ponds Gone Wrong at
your place, but if you have a pond and a professional installed it,
and it's not doing well, I would like to know about it.
You can send me an email and I'll take a look at that and
hopefully we can help you get it figured out.
Okay, so that's it about ponds gone wrong.
Question of the day.
It's my understanding that pond owners will have three ponds in
their lifetime.
Which pond number are you on?
Your first pond, second pond, third pond?
Or are you a pond-aholic, do you have more than that?
Tell me which number you're at, put it right here in the comments below.
In the meantime you know how to get me to answer your questions
#asktheponddigger Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
And we'll do our best to find it.
Until next time, I'm Eric Triplett the pond digger.
Thanks for watching.
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