Question for filtered duck pond experts....

[diosa]

Is a sump pump too fast and powerful for a 150gallon pond with a 50 gallon Skippy filter and a gravel bed duckponic system? I have 4 ducks. I read somewhere in the Skippy stuff that the water needs to spend time in the filter and the whole pond should go through twice an hour so that's only 300gph so a sump pump will deal well with thsolids but is it going to run the water through too fast? Bit confused!

 

[Amiga]

See if @OldGuy43 can help - he uses a pump.

 

[diosa]

Thanks but he says his pump died after a year and with his set up he still has to empty and refill every couple of weeks.

 

[smonkeySK]

Depends whether you are filtering or settling - settlement works best at slow pump rates and eases the load on a mechanical filter set up after the settlement chamber.
That said, you can overcome the higher pump speed by using a larger settlement tank- in the case of an all in one system like the skippy aims to be, you would have to use a larger area for the centrifugal setup at the bottom.
The rule of thumb for full circulation twice an hour also comes with the recommendation that your filter volume is 10% of the pond volume.
So for a 150gallon pond you would be looking at a 15gallon filter system recirculating twice an hour.

I have a 2000 litre pond with about 150 litres of filter chambers in total - my mechanical filter is 80 litres with a pump flow rate of 8000 litres per hour. It is technically undersized and the settlement centrifuge is decidedly un efficient due to my see how it goes mentality!
However even though it is flying in the face of the recommendations of 1000s of koi keepers the world over; it still keeps my pond water clear and settles out a phenomenal amount of waste.

The thing is making your filters easy to clean - we're keeping ducks not fish and regardless of what a skippy filter can do for a fish pond without ever needing to clean it- in a duck pond the sheer volume of poop WILL lead to blockage. The size of your filter dictates how often those clean downs will be needed.

Don't know if these ramblings will help you any but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the only person who can say whether your setup is good enough - is you!

If your water is clear enough for you and the frequency of maintenance is acceptable then you've cracked it! If the answer is no to either question then that is the time to question your setup