Thanks so much Mary. I am very new at this and appreciate all of your help. Yes I do have a fountain that has a box that I have been rinsing off the filters but leaving the bio-balls alone in the water in the box. It also has a 3 ft. waterfall. In the future I will try to find the discussion section and chat their. Thanks again, Debbie

I ditto tiller and others. Good advice from all so far. The only thing I would add about chemicals...is that there is one bottle of stuff you really should have, and that is a water treatment for Chlorine and Chlorimines. Chlorine is not that bad if you add less than 10-20% of your total amount at once. The fish can get Gill Burn if they play in the hose spray so put the hose in a area they can't get to. The chlorine will hurt your bacteria colonies in your bio filter but won't wipe em out. After a day or two contact with the air will dissipate the chlorine (it will go faster if you have an airator or waterfall). Chlorimines though are baaaad. They will never leave your pond without being treated with an additive. You can call your water company and see if they use chlorimines. If they do, then you need to get in the habit of using a neutralizer every water change. If they don't then you can get away without, unless you notice your plants being hurt by chlorine when you change the water. "Bad stuff" on the bottom are organic compounds like leaves, fish poop, dead fish etc. As it decomposes it will create a layer of mud called "muck". It's black and smells bad. If your pond ever has a sewer odor that's a sure sign that your muck has run amok and the fish are in danger. When this happens oxygen levels drop and you start getting brown algae and your water will look like rootbeer. Anaerobic bacteria start to go to work in the oxygen free environment. This is a fish death sentence. You should regularly scoop out the majority of the muck leaving as little as possible on the bottom after it settles back down. "Regularly" depends on your pond. More trees, dust, pollen, weaker filter etc mean you need to clean it up more or less than others. There is no rule about how often to clean. To clean out muck, you just need to scoop it out. You can do that by hand, with a bucket or shop vac. One thing I like is this little attachment that goes on the end of a garden hose. The flow of the hose water creates venturi suction that pushes the muck into a little nylon bag. Keep in mind that with any of these options you will stir up the muck and it will take a day or so to see improvement. If you do it regularly, the stirred up muck isn't a problem for the fish. But if you have a deep layer of it you might want to do what destany said above, and move the fish into a container for a bit (filled with pond water!) as all those bad compounds will be spiked during the clean. If your depth is closer to 3 feet I would still think about either getting rid of the goldfish (donate them to a pet store or other ponder) or the koi. With either 3 koi or 11 goldfish you have about the right fishload. But with both, you have about double what you will need in a year or so when they get big. If you are dead set on keeping all of them, you need to plan on losing some to stress or plan on getting a heavy duty biofilter and/or doing regular muck sweeping.

I feel more confident now about putting a rubber liner in there if I need to. Good news is that my neighbor who has 20 fish is willing to give me 3 of them to try this afternoon. He says for the winter I could just dump them back into his pond. He's bringing me some food to get started with too. He doesnt know what kind of fish they are, he bought the house and the fish came along in the pond. I am going to try to ID them, maybe I could post a photo of them. We're thinking of fish names right now. I have the pump that makes the water go up the waterfall then trickle into the pond. I hope that's all the equipment I need and I hope that pump is sufficient to make oxygen, cuz I think they need that, not sure. Will I have to run it 24 hours a day?

I apologize for the length of this post in advance. As has been mentioned above your high pH is most likely the result of the algae bloom that you are experiencing. Typically -again, as inferred above - algae consume carbon dioxide during the day causing the pH to increase and produce carbon dioxide (along with the bacteria and other things in your pond) during the night lowering the pH in some cases as much as 1.5 pH units (a factor of over 30x the hydrogen ion concentration!). Where I live we have to shut down the biofilters during the winter and essentially start the pond and filter up each spring. When this begins I will typically get a bit of suspended algae then a fair amount of stringy, slimy algae. Yet when I turn on the pumps (I usually wait until the water temp is above 45 or so since the biofilter and associated nitrifiers wont do much of anything below that temperature) the floating, stringy algae as well as the suspended algae are essentially gone within 72 hours. Even the algae on many of the rocks is either absent or drastically reduced. I try to use and do things that fall under the category of "do no harm". I have barley straw in the waterfall housing - not that I particularly believe that barley straw works just that at moderate application rates it doesnt appear to harm anything. Click here for article about barley straw I add salt to get the salinity level (not the same as measuring the sodium concentration) up to about 0.05%-0.1%. I do this because there are some non-scientific reports indicating that salt will suppress string algae growth. More importantly I do this to increase slime coat production of the fish until their immune systems can catch up with the other "bugs" in the pond - typically above about 55 degrees or so. If necessary I will add hydrogen peroxide to the tune of 1-2 pints per 1000 gallons (some folks add hydrogen peroxide at the rate of 1-2 pints per 100 gallons - using 3% store stuff). Both salt and hydrogen peroxide are, again, fairly benign in that all of the plants, frogs, toads, fish, etc. tolerate relatively wide variations in dose regardless of temperature and other factors. So if you dont know the exact pond volume or you happen to spill a bit too much...not a problem. Again, this fits in with "do no harm". Click here for Excel spreadsheet to calculate hydrogen peroxide doses -see bottom tab on spreadsheet In addition to all of this I will sometimes add daphnia once the water temperature hits 65 or above. These are highly efficient algae eating bugs, fish eat them, some fish fanciers actually grow them to feed them to their fish. The following is a web article, non-scientific publication on daphnia for algae control. Click here for web article on use of daphnia for algae control The other thing I do is add sodium bicarbonate to provide alkalinity and protect the pond from the potential of a pH crash. And it is at this point I wanted to clarify what alkalinity is and is not doing for you. You may just wish to skip what follows. If not, then you may want to open the jpeg graph/image in another window. If, after this, you wish more information please drop me an e-mail and I can explain the chemistry in much more detail or alternatively send me your phone number (if you are in North America!) and Im willing to call and chat with you, if you would like. Please dont ask me to call you just so you can give me a hard time I have others who are willing to do that for you! :-)) Alkalinity in our ponds is predominately the result of the bicarbonate ion. There are many other potential buffering systems out there but this is the only one of any significance in a natural system. The red line in the diagram represents what happens as you add your KH solution to your vial you start at some beginning pH (in this diagram Ive started at ~8.3 where the blue line passes through the red line) and as you add drop by drop the pH in the vial changes until you get a color change. This occurs at a pH of approximately 4.5. You calculate your alkalinity by counting the drops and then multiplying by 17.9 (the conversion factor to convert to ppm). Essentially what you have done is measured the amount of acid added to the vial - the horizontal distance from the vertical, blue line to where the pH changes to 4.5. So what? Notice that there are regions in the curve, where if you could record the actual pH as you added the drops, that the pH doesnt change too much - indicated by those ovals around pH 6.3 and 10.3. These are the points of maximum buffering intensity. Also notice that the pH drops fairly dramatically in the pH ranges of 8.3 (very important!) as well as around 4.5. These steep, vertical regions are ranges where there is minimal buffering of pH swings. In the pond described above the pH is as high as 9.5 (just visually move the blue line to the left a bit). When you add sodium bicarbonate it will not drop the pH much, but more importantly it cannot protect your pond very well from pH swings in the pH 7.7 to 8.7 region. Adding sodium bicarbonate will move the whole red line to the right (adds alkalinity) but you will still have this same region permitting pH swings to occur. Please do not think that I am saying not to add sodium bicarb (good, old Arm & Hammer). But to really control the pH swings you need to go after the algae. You need alkalinity in your pond to eliminate or protect against a pH crash. Again I apologize for this long post. Hope it is of some help. David