So my parents have a swimming pool in their backyard (they bought the house partly due to me and my sister really really really wanting a pool in our back yard...) and now that neither of us lives at home any more, it's not used it much, but my dad still does maintenance on it.
I sort of jokingly said something about converting it to a koi pond when my mom complained about having to keep it going the other day, and she semi-jumped on the idea.
So the question is... how feasible is this? How much maintenance would it require (more? less? than a pool)? Is there a way to set it up so that it would require relatively low maintenance (having the right fish/plant balance perhaps)? Any other concerns? Obviously it'd take effort, and it'd probably be a relatively long-term project, but it doesn't hurt anything to even briefly consider it (my dad may decide it's easier to keep it a swimming pool
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They live near San Jose, CA, so fairly temperate climate year-round. For the summer, it does get shade through the later part of the afternoon, and it tends not to warm up much til noonish (if I recall, I never wanted to go swimming in the morning because it was too cold for me). I don't know its capacity, but it's a good-sized kidney-shaped pool with sloping sides, about 3 feet deep at the shallow end, probably 7-9 feet at the deepest point (my dad made measurements at one point to estimate its volume, but I have no idea if he still has that anywhere still...).
I sort of jokingly said something about converting it to a koi pond when my mom complained about having to keep it going the other day, and she semi-jumped on the idea.
So the question is... how feasible is this? How much maintenance would it require (more? less? than a pool)? Is there a way to set it up so that it would require relatively low maintenance (having the right fish/plant balance perhaps)? Any other concerns? Obviously it'd take effort, and it'd probably be a relatively long-term project, but it doesn't hurt anything to even briefly consider it (my dad may decide it's easier to keep it a swimming pool
)They live near San Jose, CA, so fairly temperate climate year-round. For the summer, it does get shade through the later part of the afternoon, and it tends not to warm up much til noonish (if I recall, I never wanted to go swimming in the morning because it was too cold for me). I don't know its capacity, but it's a good-sized kidney-shaped pool with sloping sides, about 3 feet deep at the shallow end, probably 7-9 feet at the deepest point (my dad made measurements at one point to estimate its volume, but I have no idea if he still has that anywhere still...).
