Here's a question - if the pump is sitting in the 5 gallons bucket on the bank - how are you drawing water into it? Or - is the bucket sitting on the bank just for picture purposes?

The prefilter I use is similar to an Adam's filter. It has helped to keep my pump from getting clogged and needing the daily maintenance it needed when I first bought the house (and pond). But what really has made the difference for me is getting into the pond in the spring to clean it out by hand, scooping out all the muck. letting it settle, then coming back and doing it again, and then a third time. This included pulling out (for good!) all the hundreds of small rocks that the previous owner had on the bottom where the mulm would sit on top and inbetween. Now because I started with a sparkling clean pond, the prefilter catches the little thats left or it settles to the bottom around the prefilter. I just go out daily with a fish net and scoop the area on the bottom where I start to see a little mulm gathering. This takes about 1 minute every day. Because I maintain it daily, theres so little mulm in the pond, my prefilter catches easily whats there, and next to nothing goes to my skippy. But last year, when I didn't do such a great job at cleaning the pond in the spring, my skippy ended up with about 4 inches of muck by the end of the season. I won't allow that to happen again. Its the spring cleaning that leads to the entire summer of pond cleanliness for me.

kaysbelle, it is just for show purposes. It goes inside the pond.

The prefilter is below the white pipe in the pond below the lighthouse.

{{gwi:204822}}

I have my pump in my skimmer box but I wrap the pump in quilt batting and take it out throw away the batting and replace it once a week or so.

Catfishsam:

My prefilter is very similar to yours. I have my pump in a large thickwalled plastic flower pot (with a couple of bricks added for ballast). I use nylon pot scrubbies in laundry bags for the filter media. It works great except this spring, I had what looked like string algae but was really mushy, ooze through and clog up the pump so the flow slowed down after about a week. Now I'm back to regular string algae and do not have the problem anymore.