Bestway is The Way

[DocJLo]

First post here, long time lurker.

I have been keeping koi for a while, but recently hard to start over again after we moved into our new homes. The following is the culmination of a lot of work and a few minor sunburns. As they say, a pond is a hole into your yard into which you throw time and money.

Filtration:

• Bottom drain and skimmer gravity fed via 4” lines to AquaKing Red Label RDF 50/55
• RDF feeds via two Periha 25000 running at 140w (total ~11.2K gph turnover) to barrel filled with ceramic media sticks (aerated via DIY venturis from the pump outlets)
• Catalytic carbon filters also running continuous drip flow through-to-overflow at about 16% per week (about 3.75 gallons/hr); so far zero chloramines, really pleased with how well they’re running

The top picture is prior to a full water change (total gallons is measured at 3970 +\- 20 gallons), so there was some planktonic algae running around. I’ve since added Nualgi (which favors diatoms) and Ki-Nitrifier (cold shipped aquaponics grade bacteria) to see if I can get the system favoring bacterial growth and diatoms over green planktonic algae. Eventually, this pond will get taken down and a concrete 6500 gallon pond will get built with beefed up biofiltration via Bakki showers.

Let me know what y’all think!

 

[BIG-G]

welcome to MFK!
Do you plan on koi again or something else?

 

[DocJLo]

welcome to MFK!
Do you plan on koi again or something else?

Thank you!

I’ll probably stick to koi since besides being big fish, they’re really not terribly hard to raise and they’re really docile.

I have these sitting in a 300 gallon Rubbermaid stock tank that I’m using as a QT for now. They fattened up quite a bit since then and have begun to stretch out, so I’m pretty excited to see how they’ll do in a dramatically bigger system. Until my next shipment comes in, they’ll basically have ~ 1300 gallons per fish lol.