Guy

There's also some in the stream that runs through Karo park. My parents live in Inglewood and Dad mentioned that he saw some bullies etc in the stream the other day. They are up in Rewa St so gives an idea of the area anyways.

So a flurry of work over the weekend got all the little bits tidied up and its looking good.

Yeah Caryl, I did a quick check when I first got the house as the place was previously owned by an Chinese family. Also As a kid we had a large dam full of koi, some over 2-3ft in length. I once got one on a fly rod for all of 10 sec's until it emptied the spool of line. Very intelligent fish, watched MAF for days trying to catch them using a set net across the dam. They would just swim up to it, and then either dive down under it, or swim along until they found where a float was missing and then jump across. Even so I'd rather they weren't present at all in NZ. In time I'll probably trade most of them and acquire some natives for both ponds

I'll try and get some photo's soon. Yes they are a sooty black on top and a bronze underneath. So I thought maybe uncoloured comets as well, but some of them are 20cm long.... so don't think they will be changing. Given the old pond was at least 10yrs old by the looks of it there may have been a couple of generations in it and these are the results. There's about 40 young ones between 2cm and 5cm so some of these may change. G2

So I inherited a pond and fish when I purchased my current house 6 months ago and as in my other postings you'll see that I've built a new tank and shifted the fish across. So next big question, what exactly have I got. There's 5 18-20cm truly orange fish that Im pretty certain are comets (single anal fin, single 2 pronged tail with pointed ends. Ok so what about the ones that have the same features except that they have some gold scales underneath and the rest is black. Other than that they look like the comets and of these I probably have 40 of in various sizes from 2cm to 20cm. G2

So got this far and got it filled and realised I haven't solved the overflow problem. A trip to the HW store and found this. Its a marley down pipe adapter from there 1/2 round to 80mm pipe. Im going to cut a outline of this in the top board at the back on the inner box and then lay the liner into it. As it has a built in sloop down to the pipe it should work well. I'll then pipe it out and via a bend into a piece of down pipe and away safely. The bio filter is a 2.4m long x .6m wide x 30cm deep box. 30cm in from the main pond end is a weir which overflows onto some rocks to cascade into the main pond. The rocks can be removed and this exposes a hole under some liner than diverts water from the weir to the ground rather than the tank. This is so I can flood the swamp every month or so and flush it out. I'll probably put a mesh across the weir when doing this to stop flushing any fishy's away. The biofilter has a 25mm pipe running its length in the bottom with holes all along it, this is where water enters the filter. Covering this is 70mm of scoria and then another 70mm of gap 7. This should leave about 100mm of water above the stone. Now the gap 7 I got in bags has an inordinate amount of clay in it and is taking a LOT of cleaning before I allow the water to flow into the pond. Also to help cleaning I added a bottom drain to the bio filter. The US sites rave about having them and then I saw the price. Well a bit of kiwi thinking and a another walk around the HW shop and I found a solution. Its a sink adapter for a sink that used to have a waster disposal in it. It has two very big stainless steel washers in it. Glue some liner to each of these with some silicon sealer and then use them to compress against the pond liner in the biofilter and it works well. I put a tap underneath, but it equally could have been a water intake for an external pump in a main tank. And at $30 not a bad solution. All pipe work is 25mm pipe using a lot of fittings commonly used in farm water supplies. These are really cheap at mastertrade, 3 times the price at Bunnings!!!!. I've got 2 pumps a 3000L/hr for the swamp and a 2000L/hr that goes through a canister filter/UV system. I prefer this as it gives me resiliency should any one pump fail. The 2000L/hr pump is an Oase, yeah I could have got a cheaper Chinese pump, but a quick calc and the Oase will last twice as long and use at least $50 less power per year. I've also just in the process of putting a rain water harvesting system in from the house roof. I've put a T connector into the feed to the biofilter and put a tap and a hose connector on the tap. This will allow me to run a hose from the rainwater tank pump and connect it to the pond when I need to add water but with the added advantage it will have to pass through the bio filter first before it gets to the main pond. there's non return valves to stop it forcing back to the pump and into the rain water tanks. If you haven't worked it out by now, I trained as an Engineer many years ago, so the pond has lots of what if protections built in and probably grossly over engineered. So I wrote all before getting home this evening. When I found that the old pond which still had all my fish in it (waiting for the new pond to settle in for a few weeks) had decided to start leaking even more, loosing 500L during the day. So there was a quick shift of pumps, the box filter etc into the new tank and then catch all the fish (40+ of all sizes) before the light ran out..... Well they are all in the new tank now as well as 2 big water lilies so hopefully it should settle down without to many prob's. I'm going to be checking nitrate and ammonia levels a lot for the next week or so...

Yeap here's some more info on how I've built it. In designing it the key thing was to elminate some of the problems with the pond I inherited. A deep pond at ground level is hard to work on other than climbing in it. Existing pond was 80cm deep and surrounded by a rock garden Bring the fish closer to the eye I wanted to go with a bio filter with luck it might bring some native frogs in The garden theme is NZ native sub tropical Added a canister UV filter as well. Controlled overflow when the pond overflows in heavy weather, it did with the Auckland floods this past winter Leaks easier to find and fix If possible preserve the current weeping elm and use it as shade, old pond has very little So I went with a timber box construction roughly 2m wide x 2.4 long and .75m high and integrated into the deck. Once the deck is built it'll be 45cm above the deck and perfect seating height. So there is two boxes one inside the other built out of tongue and grove retaining timber, in this case 175x42mm H4. The posts are H5 piles. By over lapping the corner timbers boards from one wall stop the adjacent wall pushing out The T&G also makes the wall considerable stronger and stops one board bowing out more than its adjacent boards. its all about spreading the load of the water. On the main pond I used pond underlay on the sides to reduce the chance of a pinch leave of the liner from contracting and expanding boards. Then a good pond liner was installed wth stainless steel staples. 70mm of sand on top of wed mat was put in the bottom. Wed mate to stop the sand going down into the light volcanic soil and also hopefully to discourage the elms roots. I cut a rebate in the top of the boards in the inner box and then screwed down a strip of wood into this to lock the liner in place. (actually the tonge that was cut off the top boards reused upside down) This was to try and minimise point loads on the liner which are more likely to tear. .

Tnanks just updates my location, I'm in Onehunga Auckland

Yeah being above ground building a wooden structure to contain nearly 2 tonnes of water has its challenges, hence the box with in a box all made out of 175x 42 T&G retaining timber. Got to finish off with a capping around the main pond and weir installed and lined for the swamp. Also need to retrofit an overflow into the main pond to get controlled flooding in the case of heavy rain. 4 days now and its only dropped a few mm's YEH no leaks the old pond goes through 300L a week and Im on metered water. The biofliter has a bottom drain, cut and sealed into the pond lining to allow me to flush it when needed. In some ways wish I'd added one to the main pond as well for the pumps and filters

Well buying a house and getting an old in ground 2500L concrete pond that's full of leaks, had some fish, but no pump or filter, gets lots of sun etc etc, you'd be surprised that I just didn't fill it in and be done with it. Well 6 months latter a pump and filter, LOTs of water and I have 8 15cm-20cm gold fish, some gold some black, and 20-30 young ones in the last month. Well a new pond became part of the renovation project and over Jan I got to work building it. As you can see its above ground, around 1800L in the main pool (58cm deep) with a 230L biofilter/swamp in the long box to the left. no sure what exactly Im going to poant in the swamp yet, though leaning to wards using NZ natives and may put some bullies in there as well. There's a lot of landscaping to be done in the future, including a deck around the base. The need to demolish the old pond to put some new drainage in pushed this part of the project to the front of the queue, well that's my excuse anyways Guy