Before
we show you our individual surface skimmers - lets just
explain a little about the function of the surface skimmer and
what it does ..
 The Surface Skimmer is quite an
important piece of equipment for any pond, but more essentially
for the Koi Pond .. and it is more often forgotten about at the
time of constructing the pond, than it is remembered ..
If you are going to build a new
Koi pond then please don't forget to fit one of these surface
skimmers, on larger ponds two or more may be needed .. and these
are built into the walls of the pond at the time of construction
...
The purpose of the Surface
Skimmer is to skim, or pull off, floating debris and even dust
from the surface of your pond ... these cannot be gravity
fed very successfully and we recommend that they are powered up
using its own separate pump and utilising its own filtration
system .. to explain that a little more ... When the
surface skimmer is built into the wall the pipe carrying the
waste and of course the surface water, is pulled using a
suitable pump - for example one of the Oase Aquamax range of
pumps are ideal and depending on the size of the pond of course
depends on which model of the Aquamax is deployed - but normally
this would be either the 5,000 or the 10,000 (both models low
wattage pumps) and from the outlet on the pump itself the water
can be returned direct to the pond, or to a waterfall, or other
pond feature. But it better practice to return the water via
some sort of filter, and you can if you wish use one of those
'Orrible' box filters for this purpose (and you won't hear me
advocating that sort a filter for any other purpose - as they
are best left to do the job they were intended for in the first
place - holding water in a loft, as a header tank !) But for
this purpose they will do as all we need to do is to filter out
the very finest of particles that get past the skimmer and the
pump before returning the water to the pond .. there is very
little point in using a skimmer to skim off the floating debris
and allowing the finer particles and dust to return to the pond
again .. do the job once and do it right ..
Better than one of those simple
box filters of course is the Hidroclean cartridge filter ..
these are ideally suited for the purpose and are very easily
cleaned ... but you will need to budget for this additional
piece of equipment at the time ..
We are very often asked if
returning the water from the surface skimmer can be filtered in
the main filtration system .. in short Yes of course it can ..
.but it has its pitfalls .. I will try to explain further
.. if the filtration system is gravity fed from a bottom
drain and say for example the pond has a volume of 6,000 gallons
- then approximately between 2,500 gallons and 3,000 gallons per
hour is being pulled down that bottom drain .. this being the
desired flow rate .. Now if we start adding water in from
another source, other than the bottom drain, what happens is
that we then cut back on the amount of water that is actually
being pulled through the bottom drain .. water and of course
waste matter etc .. as the filter is obtaining the water that
the return pump requires from the surface skimmer, resulting in
a slow down of the water and waste products which would have
been pulled into the filtration system via the bottom drain ..
so really it is not very good idea, or good practice as
the pond will soon become cloudy etc and you may end up with a
build-up of waste and debris in the pipe from the bottom drain
.. So the long-term answer in my own opinion is don't do
it .. use the surface skimmer as an entirely separate system and
then you need only use this when you need to - it does not have
to be switched on all the time ..
Ok - enough of the explanations
lets move on to the actual skimmer boxes themselves .. on
the following pages you will see a variety of purpose made
surface skimmers ranging in price from about £35 up to £100
plus .. and we even have a Multi In Pond Skimmer for those
of you who forgot to incorporate a skimmer into your pond walls
at the time ... and these are very good and work very well
...
If you should have any
question, or point that I have not covered here, then please
contact me by email at sales@koicarp.net.
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