Thinking About A Pond

[TropicalNorth]

Me and my family are thinking about installing a pond in our front garden, so I want to do plenty of research first. It will probably be a prefabricated pond around 190g (like the picture below). It will be going in a partially shaded area and will be next to the house.

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q201/renay86/Pond.jpg

Anyway onto the questions.
What type of filtration would be best for this size pond (pressurized, internal etc)?
What kind of turnover should I be aiming for?
If pressurized is the best idea, I was thinking the easiest thing to do would be drill a hole at each end of the pond (for the inlet and outlet) so all the pipes could be hidden underground. Would this work?
How would an overflow work on this kind of system or would rocks around the pond be enough?

Any more info and links would be helpful. Thanks.

[GoldLenny]

I see you have several tanks so I know you'll do your research. Here is my blog on DIY ponds http://goldlenny.blogspot.com/2007/03/pond-information-and-diy-pond.html with links to many resources for DIY'ers and also has a link to this page of AquaArticles on ponds... good reading for a beginner... http://www.aquarticles.com/articles/ponds/index.html

If your concern about an overflow is due to rain, then the rocks lining the exterior of the pond would work. If the pond is reasonbly level, the overflow over the sides of the pond will be at a very slow rate so it should not be a concern... it has never caused problems with any of my three mini-ponds. Now if the pond was not level, where the overflow was all rushing out of one area, that could be a problem as plants and possibly fish would be drawn to this area. Why were you asking?

What is the weather like there? What were you planning on stocking the pond with?

I'm not sure if you need to drill holes but if you do want to hide all of the water lines, then that is the best thing to do. Usually, the water lines are hidden by potted plants, etc. along the perimeter of the pond if you were to go with a non-plumbed external filter. Actually, in the smaller ponds like that (mini-ponds are those under 1,000G), I've usually just used an in-pond DIY pre-filter around the pump for a waterfall or ornamental spitter that circulates 2X the pond volume... in your case 350-400 gph... but if you do go with an external filter, that would make things even better for your fish.

[TropicalNorth]

Thanks for the links and info.

I live in North Queensland Australia, monsoon country so we get heavy rains in summer and some rain all year round. Making it level would be no problem, my Dad is a mechanical engineer :).

I'm thinking of stocking it with say 3 goldfish and a few platies (plus plants like lillies etc). It only gets down to 10c (50f) so freezing won't be an issue and some people I know have platies in ponds around here so they should be fine.

I like the idea of a diy pre-filter on a pump, I was thinking of having a fountain in the middle anyway. Would that work with the kind of stocking I'm thinking of?

[GoldLenny]

The platies aren't much of a bioload and three comets or sarasas would be best as common goldfish might get a bit big for your pond. Comets are long-bodied goldfish with longer flowing tail fins and sarasas actually have coloring patters similar to Koi and they both only grow to the 12" to 15" range where common goldfish should grow up to 24" and would be subject to stunting in your pond. Sounds like it's going to be a nice feature.

[TropicalNorth]

Okay thanks.