Nachus retro

[Kent Wallace]

It seems like much more than half of my business is in retros these days. It would be nice to actually see what's at the bottom before I start. It's hard to see more than a few inches into this one.
It's a concrete pond completely landscaped in with garden hose and one of those horrible Little Giant red floats. It measured 2500 gallons when we were finished and had a clogged Triton ll sand filter. It barely flowed and someone had installed a surface skimmer on the edge but I couldn't tell how it was attached.

[Kent Wallace]

We vacuumed out the inside of the filter. Another great moment for smellavision.
We pumped our way to the bottom and started to remove the fish. /wouldn't you know it we found ROCKS.

[Kent Wallace]

We set up a tanks for the fish. Best water they've seen in years! 100 ltr/min air pumnp eith 4 airstones should make them feel better. We counted 39 fish in 2500 gallons of water.

[Kent Wallace]

I guess this was someones way of solving that pool drain screen clogging problem, just make it a skimmer.
We found what appears to be a couple of 3/4 in TPRs and unclogged them. They were closed up at the filter.

[JoeKoi]

Thanks for sharing Kent, Your threads are always so informational. And you are a really cool guy!

[Kent Wallace]

I expect to hear from all the "flow rate gurus on my solution for the bottom drain but it worked well for this aplication. I didn't want to give up the skimmer and this is a direct suction system so I used a 2X1 1/2 long sweep tee and restricted the 2in to 1 1/2 in also to force the pump draw from both. I had made up several orifices for adjustment and was prepared to dive to the bottom ad swap them out for the correct balance but this worked the first time.

[Kent Wallace]

I couldn't get my dad into his studio to make a cover for me so a Walmart pot served ok. Jay cut notches in the lip to make a three footed cover and we plugged two of the drainage holes. The high fired ceramic won't disintegrate like terra cotta will and is heavy enough to stay in place.
We also notched it for the skimmer pipe.

[Kent Wallace]

The sand filter was a downflow filter so we converted it for Williams sinking media. Sort of like building a ship in a bottle. We replaced the original rays with solid ones and drilled 3/8 holes for the water to pass through. Not too many in each ray because we don't the water to favor any one area but enough so the total won't be a restriction. We also nade a diffuser bar to spread the water out evenly from above to help with a more even distribution.

[Kent Wallace]

This filter body was large and took 10 cu ft of media to get about 60% of the volume.

[Kent Wallace]

We lowered the check valve on the inlet side and cleaned up the plumbing. We then reinstalled the existing UV light on the TPR circuit.
The autofill was converted to a Savio(Levelor) electronic auto fill. The problem was with the pond completely encased in concrete there was no way to attractively add water at the pond edge so I injected it directly into the TPR circuit after the valve and light. I used a spring loaded check valve right at the entry point and an electric antisiphon valve for the solenoid.
Yes thr color is NUTMEG.

[koiingaround]

WOW!!! Very Interesting!!!
I can't wait to see more AND the finished product!!!

[Kent Wallace]

I cut the TPR lines back close to the pond edge for safgety and the fill measured 2500 gallons. I mounted the sensor for the autofill on the side of the pond with an aluminum bracket and stainless screws.
The electrical was an accident waiting to happen so it received some attention while hanging the autofill controller.
The only things left are the extra large leaf trap and the air blower. On pump first systems a large leaf trap is a must. They should be here in a couple of days.
High volume pump first sytems have a tendancy to cloud the water. If over time the water doesn't clear enough we will have to go in an add a microscreen strainer or bead filter. We'll have to wait and see.

[Ronin-Koi]

Kent,
I'm planning my first pond, and I've been digging through your pond construction threads and have found them inspirational and very instructive in explaining things that I knew I wanted to install, but couldn't quite figure out how to make them work yet. All the photos are a great help. Thanks.

On your current project, it's a real shame since the original pond is actually nice - if only the installer had put in the functional elements correctly the first time. I wanted to clarify: So you are taking the outlet from the skimmer, and dumping it into the bottom drain reservoir? And your pump is drawing from both the skimmer, and also through the bottom drain, and sending it to the media filter? Is there any other mechanical filter between the pump and media filter?

Thanks,
- Wayne, wondering how many pounds of fish the 39 fish equals.

[Kent Wallace]

Wayne
The skimmer doesn't dump ointo the drain, it is connected directly to the wye and the wye is inserted into the 2" threaded inlet at the bottom of the drain. The pump pulls from both skimmer and bottom because of the wye. I would never suggest this as a way to do it from scratch. It was my way of solving this situation.

a pond build from scratch should always have a bottom drain leading to a settling tank!!!!!!!!!!
Ther is no other mechanical filtration as of yet, If the pond doesn't clear up we'll tackle that next but first lets see how much the sinking media can do. The tank is large allowing more dwell time so some of it will get pulled out anyway. How much we don't know.

[Kent Wallace]

It's been a few days and the extra large leaf trap and air blower arrived. The pond looks great and it appears that the huge size and 10 cu ft of Williams sinking media did manage to collect and filter out nthe fines.
Now you can see the ceramic pot bottom drain I forgot to take a pic of earlier.

[Kent Wallace]

I added the new large leaf trap and air blower. Finished

[Xavier D]

I must say... I love your ingenuity Kent. Always great to see how your brain works to solve problems most of us wouldn't even try to fix, or would just start from scratch on. Again, thanks for all the pics and explanation!

Xavier

[MCA]

It is criminal that someone built that pond that way and put in so many fish!!!

Thank goodness you are doing a retro!

[CarolinaGirl]

What an improvement! Thanks for sharing!!

[koiingaround]

Is that a Cal Skimmer I see on the right of the pond picture???