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That duckponics thread is great, but I think that the author said that it did not work in the end. You need a very big biofilter to cope with duck pond water. With a big, well designed filter, it can work.

You would probably not need to run the pump continuously. You can just put it on a timer, maybe draining the pond once a day, with the pond refiling from the growbed/biofilter/reedbad via gravity. That would work fine.

One issue with a duck pond is that it will accumulate a lot of sludge on the bottom. Ideally, you'd have a hose on a timer, pointed into the pond, and just before the drain cycle starts, run water in to the pond to stir up the muck so a lot of it drains away. Then, when the drain cycle is nearing the end, have it squirt water in again to wash out more muck towards the pump.

If you are going to use a sump pump then I woudl not put it in the pond itself but in an actual sump that has the same height as your pond (so the water levels are the same) but that also is deeper than your pond (so it can completely drain the pond). The sump would be connected to your pond via a pipe running from the bottom of the pond and the sump. When the pump comes on it will drain all the water out of the pond and most of the water out of the sump (a pump can't drain right to the bottom, so you'd still have an inch or two of water in the bottom of the sump). The pic below shows what I mean. The biofilter is not meant to be floating in the air, just somewhere a bit uphill from the pond. You'd need the biofilter to drain slowly into the pond, and only when water coming in from the sump pump 'pushes' clean water out the other end. Also, you wouldn't actually need the 'U' bend in the drain from the pond to the sump....you'd just need a drain coming out of the bottom of the pond but then going into the side of the sump at a level lower than the bottom of the pond. Anyhow, here is the picture :)

 
70% thank you so much, that is a really helpful explanation and drawing! You are right that a once a day filtration cycle might be all that's needed, especially with a powerful pump, and of course a separate sump makes much more sense! I thought from reading the duck-ponics thread that it was eventually all working out OK, but the author lost one (or more?) ducks to hawks and no longer alowed them access to the uncovered pond area.
Edited: for auto-correct spelling errors!
 
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Glad that the drawing is helpful :)

I was also thinking that you'd probably have to experiment a bit with timing of pumping.. You might also want to keep the part of the biofilter where the pond water is pumped in clear of plants, because you'd probably need to dig out the gravel there now and then to wash it free of sludge.

But I think that the only real limitation is having a big enough biofilter, packed with plants.

For systems that are designed to treat human grey water (like, from your bath or shower), the recommendation is that the dirty water spends at least 5 days in the biofilter before coming out the other end. That means that it needs to take five days for water molecules going in, to reach the other end. So your biofilter needs to be five times bigger than the quantity of water going into it daily from your pond. Your biofilter will also be full of gravel, so this will take up a lot of volume, leaving some volume available for the water. In a container that is filled with gravel, generally about one third (from memory) of the space is available for water. To account for the treatment time and gravel volumne you will need a biofilter that has the following volume:

Volume = pond volume x 5 (days) x 3 (to account for the gravel)
e.g.
Volumne = 50 gallons x 5 x 3 = 750 gallons.

So, to treat the water properly, the biofilter needs to be much bigger than the pond.

You can put any plants you like in the biofilter but reeds are good because they are used to living in water and so they have a system of drawing oxygen down to their roots. This helps to oxygenate the water. But you can use edible plants too (like a hydroponic system).

I'd love to have a full water treatment system like this myself, but I don't. The closest I have come is pumping my duck water onto the garden via drip irrigation (after filtration using a greywater filter deisgned for human greywater filter systems). I also have a bog/swamp garden (an ex-fish pond) that I direct extra water too - it's just an ornamental way of treating the water a bit before it seeps into the garden. I am making another one of these for excess water that is set up except for planting the plants.
 
Great thread, beautiful setups!!

I currently have a walmart pool that I am filling, as a single mom though, it stinks my water bill has gone up so much!

I am refilling/cleaning every 3 days but because they stay in it so much, I don't know how healthy it is because there is so much duck poop...do you think it is ok?

It is also getting pretty hot during the day, any thoughts beside shade for cooling? I thought about freezing some water bottles and throwing them in there couple times day.
 
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Some people make treat cubes for the ducks and throw 'em in the pond. These would consist of layering water with vegetables and letting it freeze and then adding another layer with something else and letting it freeze until you have a puck of frozen treats for the ducks.
 
Furbabymum, I think that would work. If you can make the vegetation about 50% of the size of the pond that'd be even better. I think your indicated depths are good - 4 feet for the pond and 2 feet for the biofilter. With the plants, in the biofilter I am guessing you will have plants with roots in the soil - you want it quite well populated with plants. You could add another area after the biofilter that is also fenced but just water and have in that area plants that have their roots in the water (i.e. floating plants). These will help clean the water too. You can have these pretty densely packed too. With the biofilter I'd pump the water in one end and then let it come out via gravity at the other end. You do not want much of a slope anywhere - in fact the biofilter can be completely level.

How may ducks are you thinking of?

Tweetysvoice, I think it'd be fine to have some water splashed into the middle and end parts of the biofilter. I think it'd cope with that.
 

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