I've read that you are not to clean the fiilter media...ever. I built my own biofilter...not a skippy but I am about to add one due to all the good things I have heard about them. My pond is in the stage of green pea soup also. I have heard it is a stage that ponds go through this time of year. I am trying the quilt batting. I have it in the top layer of my biofilter and it is catching quite a bit of the algae. I purchased mine from Michaels. I also am using it around my pump. I am letting it run two hours around the pump because it gets pretty dirty quickly. This works great to catch all the small algae. You have to be careful to not catch the batting in the pump. I guess we will see how good it works. I'm thinking about building something that would add some type of barrier between the batting and pump to avoid this problem. Probably a project for tomorrow. Good luck! If anyone has good ideas to get the pond clear I am open to the hints as well!

They don't have to be that close together. Within 100 feet should do it. Anywhere in a normal sized yard that looks good would be the way I would go.

"Right" pH is a bit of a misnomer -- most plants will tolerate, even thrive, in a relatively wide range of pH and peppers are no exception. A quick Google search turned up the following ranges: 5.5-7.0, 6.0-6.5, 6.5-7.5. Unless you were growing a specifically acid-loving plant (blueberries, potatoes, etc.), a slightly acidic soil (6.3-6.8) is the preferred range for the largest number of plants. I wouldn't bother to do any adjusting to a potting soil. The need for frequent supplemental fertilization for any containerized plant will override any need for fine tuning the pH any further.

Hi, Pauled99, I am not sure I understood your question exactly. It may be easiest for me to try to explain it in my terms. Both vertical pipes from the basement serve the same purpose they did originally. I just crossed them left-to-right before they came up from the basement. The leftmost copper pipe, which extends vertically from the basement and makes a right-angle turn to become horizontal and enters the galvanized tee in its middle port, only vents a sink in a bathroom in the basement. Obviously, the horizontal section is well above the flood rim of the basement fixture. The right copper pipe comes up from the basement, turns 90 deg to the right to become a horizontal drain (sloped at 1/4" per foot), turns vertical, and is teed into the stub-out for the kitchen sink with a sanitary tee. Above this tee, it is now considered a vent. It then turns 45 deg (remaining a "vertical" vent), and then turns 45 deg the other way to go into the bottom port of the galvanized tee. The vertical galvanized pipe vents both the basement and kitchen fixtures. In the basement, the two downpipes are joined by a sanitary wye below the point where the bathroom fixture joins the left-hand downpipe. The single drain then goes below the basement floor to join the main (?) house sewer line. After that picture was taken, I put steel plates over the stud notches to protect the pipes from screws/nails. The plumbing inspector took a look at the work, *briefly* thought about squawking about the galvanized tee before realizing it was strictly a vent at that point, and then admired the job and gave it a thumbs-up. If this explanation is not clear, feel free to ask a follow-up question. What I learned during this process is that the plumbing codes actually make sense, even if not at first to the uninitiated. For example, as a novice, I would have turned the drain for the sink vertically instead of horizontally, and teed it into the horizontal drain line. However, that would have made the section to the right of that tee into an illegal horizontal vent. Stuff that goes down the sink could splash to the right (i.e., upstream). Since there is no water flow there to wash it down, it could get lodged there and obstruct the vent. This was not obvious to the tyro, but makes sense to me now. Again, a thousand thanks to lazypup.