Sorry sheepco - I've been offline all week. Thanks for your kind compliment. I really love to sit there in the evening, watch fish do their chasing, listen to the water and STL Card's games whilst doing 12 oz. curls. :^> I cannot find the tag for the blue pot's plant. It had a single 'tail' when I bought it at end of planting season sale. The darker purplish color plays well with the white fence, green plants, flowers, yes? Today I await the end of rain to run out and finish some skippy rework. My bottom grate (now flimsy ceiling light grid) is getting replaced with 1" thick, 2"x2" grid and new mesh on that. Then the plastic strapping I use for bio media on top of the mesh. Other plumbing changes to simplify my life.

Sounds good but the inside of the pipe in the skippy can get pretty gunky with microbes growing on the inside and snails, debris, etc.That will close up a small hole pretty fast. I prefer to keep the larger diameter tubing clear above the water surface. I sometimes clean out the entire pipe using the vertical tube as access.I do this if water starts coming out of the vertical tube which indicates the tubing is blocked. That really cuts down on the force of the flow through the pipes. A fairly soft cleaning sponge attached to a not very stiff wire to push and pull it works well as does a small scrubby or flexible piece of coarse sponge type filter. You are just loosening caked on gunk, not scouring it clean. Someone should have jumped on my comment that the T was installed horizontally. Sorry, I must have been half asleep. The air intake tube is of course perpendicular to the surface of the water which makes it vertical. The whistle that can be so annoying is reduced or eliminated by running 14 to 18 inches of air tubing down through the vertical pipe, downstream, keeping the near end above the level of the pipe opening. Don't let the tubing get sucked entirely down. The near end must be free in the air. Or you can simply place a bamboo stick down the vertical pipe to break up the suction that is causing the whistle.

I too am a Skippy filter fan (can't remember how it got it's name or who devised it?)& outside of bit of string algae hanging around the pond plant pots, I have had clear water also now for two years (cross my fingers now!). I have an in-pond pump in a basket & place quilt batting around that first which catches most of the debris & then all the scrubbies up in the Skippy filter. Somewhere on this forum I read of someone putting mint in the Skippy filter also so I have mint growing in it every spring when I hook up the Skippy again. Whether the mint has helped... who knows, but I am keeping it growing there none-the less!! Right now most of the mosquito eating minnows the City gives away free are on maternity leave.... hundreds of teeny babies must have been born over night! Bet the goldies (& even the babies' mothers I read) though will eat most of them, sadly!) Several manage to survive over winter also. Oddly, we have never seen any goldfish babies in the several years we have had the adults! Pashta, that corkscrew plant looks great! I just bought one this year so hope it does as well! The stray duckweed that came with the new minnows from the City I put in a separate container in the pond & hope it will grow there so I can keep it & give to the fish occasionally. The bits that went into the pond with the new minnows x the City were gobbled up in no time ... they sure love that stuff! Illegal to sell here though. Good luck with your new pond & am sure you will find it so enjoyable!

There is no reason you could not put your skippy filters in the pond instead of outside the pond. But......you DO need to clean them. I really don't care what nonsense the people at skippy try to feed people. Clear water is not necessarly good water. If you have never seen the inside of a skippy filter after just one year of service, you will not fully understand just how nasty and disgusting they are with all of that decaying fish poop in them. I do not know why they tell people that fish poop turns into sand. It is just riduclous to tell people that and also very irresponsible. Ponds contain good bacteria and bad bacteria. The whole idea is to get a good healthy population of the good bacteria (the kind that converts your ammonia and nitrites into harmless nitrates) to be a strong population and to reduce the places where the harmful bacteria thrives. Bad bacteria thrives in places where there is no oxygen, such as in the sludge in the bottom of a filter or in the rotting sludge in the bottom of the pond. This bacteria is the kind that causes ulcers and rotting fins on fish. As the sludge builds up in the filter, there is less and less area where waterflow brings oxygen into the filter media and the good bacteria needs that oxygenated water to thrive. When a filter is cleaned, the sludge is all rinsed out of the bottom. This is not harming the good bacteria at all, since the good bacteria is not living in that sludge anyway....it is living on the bio-media. Bio-media can be rinsed with pond water or non-chlorinated water also without harming it. You do not have to start over after cleaning the filter and you never need to add any enzymes or bottled bacteria to get a pond and filter established. I have used skippy filters on small water gardens in the past and still use them on my quarantine tanks, but two 150 gallon skippy is simply not enough filtration if you intend to keep koi. You will need a bare minimum of two 300 gallon skippy filters. You need to have pumps large enough to turn over all of the water in your pond at least once every 1.5 hours. So if your pond is 13,000 gallons you will need two pumps that each move nearly 5000 gallons per hour. If you want to put the filters inside the pond, the biggest problem you will encounter is when you drain them for cleaning. Running the plumbing is easy enough....just install a bulk head fitting in the pool wall and run the drain line through the bulkhead. Keep the valve inside the pond, under water so it does not freeze in the winter. But when you empty the filter, it will float. I am not sure how to tell you to overcome this problem. It will need to be weighted down with something pretty darn heavy to keep it down. Since your pool is raised, have you though about using 55 gallon barrels for filtration instead of stock tanks? They are taller and very cheap, and you can build some wonderful DIY filters that work much, much better than a skippy filter works. You can actually put some bottom drain lines in the pool and gravity flow to the filters, then pump the water back to the pond. That way, the top of the filters would not even stick up above the top of the pool. Here is a link that might be useful: lots of DIY filteration stuff