New Pond Filtration Question

[hermxl1]

Hi,

I've been running indoor aquariums for years and this year I'm doing a pond. There seem to be as many filtration options as there are for aquariums but here's what I have in mind. The pond hole started out at about 10'x8'x3' but with all the digging I've done it may be a lil bigger now. I plan to do fish and plants and a small water fall.

The question I have is, "is a skimmer system the best route to go"? I believe you can put a submesible put in the skimmer and run a UV filter inline with the pump and water fall. The other question is, "is the bio filtration for the fish contained in the skimmer box"? And is this skimmer bio filter like a wet/dry filter?

If the filtration is this simple (sarcasm), I'm home free and I won't have to fill that big hole back in... :-)

Thanks in advance for any advice....

Herm

[anonapersona]

Actually the BEST thing is to put in a bottom drain! All crud goes down a gentle slope to the drain which is hooked to a pump that can handle some solids. Send it to any sort of filter you want, a biofalls, a pressure filter, a biofilter with UV.

For something that size you may want to add a solids settling unit before the actual filter to ease the load on the filter. That would be a chamber with baffles that slow the water and allow the solids to fall out, to be purged with a bottom valve regularly. Then, just like in a canister, through coarse filtration, fine filtration and biofiltration.

[hermxl1]

So with a skimmer, is the bio filtration stuff (Bioballs, whatever) in the skimmer? I thought about a bottom drain as well and thought that made sense, but I'm still interested in skimmers as well.

[anonapersona]

A pond skimmer is supposed to suck down things that float, things from trees for example. A skimmer can run to a filter, but it is just the surface effect.

You might cruise around the DrsFosterSmith.com pond section to see what they have, there are often educational articles there too.