We have a nice large pond on the farm but the water is very dirty looking and even gets stagnet in hot weather. I have a gasoline powered pump 3 and a half horse power how can i filter the water to make it cleaner ? It has lots of fish in it so I guess it is ok but we sure would love to swim in it. Thanks for any and all ideas. How do they get the sand to stay in a pool filter? Could I build a large box fill it with sand and pump the water thur it?
When you say "dirty looking" what color is the water? What I mean is, does it appear muddy or is it a green color? I'm not sure what you want to filter out. If it is green organic material I suspect you are fighting a losing battle, since you may have an algae bloom going on.
Old trick was to obtain some square baled straw. Toss in chucks around the edge of the pond. Somehow it causes a bonding with the clay/dirt particles in suspension, causing them to sink to the bottom. Ken Scharabok
Wellllll - I don't laugh at people, but - there is a difference between a highly chemicalled & maintained concrete lined pool in town, and a 'farm pond'. Can't easily turn the one into the other...... If your soil has any clay content, you just never will get clear water. As to stagnent, does water run _through_ this pond, or is it just a muddy hole where water ends up? With flowing water, the pond can be kept pretty fresh, but if the flow dries up for a month or 2 in dry weather, just not so much you can do about it - practically. Barley straw can really help keep a pond clearer, not just any straw bale. If the fish are thriving, the pond is probably in pretty good shape. My town has a sand bottom (with clay liner) wading pool in a state park. Even with constant filtering & all the pool chemicals a state-run pool requires, after years of operation you can't see 3' through the water due to the suspended clay particles. On a farm pond, don't know that it is practical to try to better the situation. Cystal clear water requires decades of flowing water in a river to clear out the tiny dirt particles. A pond is where the particles go _to_, so very hard to clear up... --->Paul
Also, could you please describe for us the taste of the pond water? This is very important, so you'll want to take a couple of gulps. We really do need to know about this in order to make an informed decision. -Jack_Cville
Fer as I cun tell it a taste like uh pond water maybe a littkle dead troll floatin in er. not too bad do. we like dead trolls mikell
pump AIR into the water from a deep aireator, and add PONDZYME, its a bactrial additive that breaks down the built up nitrogen in the water. also get some waterplants like duckweed and hyacinths and water lettuce. these will clean the water and then over run the pond but ducks and geese eat these like candy. the stagnation is from lack of movement and the depth of the water. get some air and life in there! the suspended alge will dissapear and the nitrogen level drops.
Don't drink the water. Don't add anything ... yet. I have a couple of ponds and am trying to figure out some similar things. One pond is crystal clear and I've done nothing with it. But it has a trickle of spring water going into it. The other pond is funky and has nothing running into it. My neighbor has a pond and the more she tries things, the funkier it gets. She's added the bacteria, she's tossed in the barley straw, she's aerated ... it just gets worse. She now thinks that if she had left it alone, it would be perfectly healthy. Specifically, she thinks that the barley straw converted the green water to water with the big cakes of algae on the surface. She says that she thinks folks should never mess with barley straw. I've read that clay will eventually settle, but it takes a couple of years. I've read that the barley straw will get rid of the green tint to the water that you can't see through, but I've also read that that green tint is a good thing: helps to keep the water cool and does add some oxygen. I'm no expert. But I do think this is one of those things where it is better to do a lot of reading before trying stuff.
We had a our duck tank and fish pond get full of the green water. We added water lettuce. and in a month the water was cleaning up. We use it evey year in all of our pond and fountains and have not had a problem.
For all the good advice I thank everyone. For the ones that thinks it was a stupid question or even funny well lets see. I guess i sounded like a city person trying to make a farm pond clear but since i grew up the son of a share cropper in Alabama spent 2 years in Vietnam Have milked cows killed hogs canned food raised gardens to feed a family of 4 on a low paying factory job and now that I am over 50 I just wanted to clean up the water in one of the four ponds on the 145 acre farm I now live on OK Go Figure!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A 1/4" pond isn't very big. If you are allowing livestock access to it, just a little bit of wading around in it would keep the mud stirred up. Deep pond tend to be cleaner than shallow ones. You might consider having a large trackhoe or dragline come in and dig it deep as far out as they can reach. Even if the cost is $100 an hour, they can do a lot of work in one day. Second alternative is to dump out the pond (you can rent large pumpers to do this) and have a dozer deepen it. If the pond is on a slope with an overflow on one side, the dirt might be used to build up a levee (heighten pond sides), allowing it to hold more water also. This is assuming you have enough run-off or a spring to keep it full. I had a pond of about one acre put in through a combination of digging and raising the sides. Every so often I have the backhoe dig as deep in one spot as they could go down. Purpose was 'bass holes' to allow fish or whatever areas of deeper water. I have a dry hydrant in my pond. Purpose is to allow the fire department pumpers to look up and quickly fill their water tanks. Some insurance companies offer a lower rate due to access to a readily available water source. Local fire department gave me most of the parts. I just had to install it myself. Normally a ditch is dug in the pond bank and the hydrant installed. The bottom leg out into the pond needs to be at least two feet below normal low-water level. I was able to attach mine to the side of a dock as my pond is spring fed and the water never gets below a certain level.
