All this talk about fish , I have to tell you my story, We have a sm. pond in back yard , and every year I go to walmart and buy about 3or 4 cheap gold fish $.28 apiece, they usually do great and they help keep the mosquitos lava down , anyway last fall when It came time to take the pond apart for the Winter, could not find the fish , so I thought a preditor had gotten them. So anyway , we had a real bad winter, got very , very cold here, When spring came and ice in pond melted, My DH was outside cking everything out he came in and said he seen fish swimming around in there, can't quite figure out how they made it through the winter with no food ,or pumps . So we call him our Miracle fish, he was about 1 1/2 long when I put him in there and is about 5 in. long now. also love this Idea, and am going to try it, Should probley have put this on conversation side but had to see what You all thought , any ideas how he survived , that pond had to have frozen solid!

A 3" pipe will feed 1500-2000 gph with modest draw-down. I'm feeding 2000 gph through matched 3" pipes about 25' long, each with one 45 degree and one 90 degree fitting; the draw-down is around 2". Angle fittings greatly increase draw-down compared to straight or gently curved runs, so their use should be minimized. Solid PVC pipe can be heated and flexed into gentle curves for a custom fit and improved flow. It's not too hard to DIY such bends, I use a gas grille with a crude shroud over it but a heat gun would probably work too. My main koi pond is about 14' by 25, both ends carefully bowl shaped to encourage debris to go to the bottom drains. 2000 gph is drawn through the 3" lines and the only thing I need to vacuum out are rocks the kids throw in and sometimes a bit of string algae or leaves that can't really get through the small gap into the drain. On a flat bottom I'd expect around 3' radius cleaning around a decent bottom drain on a nearly flat floor with this flow rate. Fish sorting around down there, though, will slowly move things in. An air dome would extend the cleaning radius greatly, if you're into that kind of fancy embellishment. Quilt batting plugs pretty easily, so I don't know how one could predict its resistance to flow. I do use Matala matting in an upflow gravity filter for an 8500 gallon garden pond and haven't had much problem with plugging there. For coarse filtration of a fish pond in a smaller footprint than a settling chamber I personally prefer the brushes, though, as they are so difficult to plug yet so effective on coarse debris. If you have room, I'd think of constructing a small pond next to the main pond for use as a settling chamber. At 3-4 feet deep it can be effective for gravity particle removal and planted with water hyacinth or iris which drop their roots down in for added filtration and beauty. No one who looks at my ponds even suspects that I have a settling chamber out in broad daylight. Hyacinth go crazy in the relatively fertile flowing water. You do have to clean the bottom occasionally. Some use solids-handling submersibles; I gravity drain a couple hundred gallons from the bottom once in a while. The bottom needs to slope towards your pump or drain for better solids removal. You might split the intake flow of a larger external pump between skimmer and bottom drains so you could fine-tune your draw to suit the equipment and conditions. A low-head external pump around 4000 gph uses well under 200 watts. Whatever pump you use, it is important to consider both intake and discharge piping and its resistance to flow. Smooth PVC pipe will flow much better than the corrugated flex pipe one often sees at big box store water garden departments. 1.5" pipe will be very restrictive on pumps over 2000 gph but work fine on little pumps. For 4000 gph low-head pumps, I minimize the 2" pipe runs by either splitting the flow between 2" pipes or upping the pipe to 3" or even 4" on both suction and pressure sides of the pump.

Thanks Vanessa, I have sort of the poor man's watergardens........all stocktanks! And my experiences are pretty limited. When people here start talking about skimmers and waterfalls, etc., I'm lost. I pretty much just do lotus and water lilies and a few marginals. I swore last year that I would cut back this year, and now I'm getting more! I think the tropical water lilies will be good, because they'll let me enjoy something all summer, that I don't have to deal with for winter. I feel bad about throwing them out, but I just haven't had any luck keeping them over winter. I have to be careful about spring fever. I always get it with the water gardening stuff and my vegetable garden stuff......then when late June, July get here, I just can't keep up. What I love about the above-ground stocktanks is that I don't have to lean over to far to really look at things! I think they let the frogs escape from the snake too. Last year I had tons of tree frogs, singing their hearts out and laying billions of eggs. I could even sit on the deck and start a conversation with them! Vanessa........here's an idea we haven't mentioned (maybe we have......my mind is shot! haha).......How about a heavy plastic container that will hold the lotus AND 4-6" of water, but when it comes time to bury it, you drain that 4-6" of water and bury the whole thing? You might even be able to leave some of that 4-6" of extra container a little above ground level, as long as you cover it well with leaves. (Hmmmm??? Do you have leaves up there in the high desert?) I'm not sure how to picture the vegetation up there. Anyhow........that might give you less to worry about......Maybe use a 15" tall rubber container. Fill it with 8-10" of dirt, and the rest water, and you're done. Do you have a tractor supply store anywhere near you? I really like the various "Tuff Stuff" containters. Be sure to get a container with a lip on it to grab.......otherwise you'll never get it lifted. Here's a link to a couple of the containers I've gotten. I use the 7 gallon one for my lilies and lotus. Its LDPE plastic and is rigid, which is good. Rubber is too wobbly. I must warn you though, I'm more into practicality and functionality, so I might not have many pretty ideas! haha You know, I didn't think about my in-ground stocktanks taking longer to heat up......but you're right! The ground definitely keeps things cooler. I envy you being in a little town. I live out in the country, but the development in this area has gone absolutely nuts, and its really changing things out here. Here is a link that might be useful: Tuff Stuff containers

Trickle Tower is primarily for conversion of ammonia and nitrites. That can be measured and we know exactly how it performs, works the same in every pond. Beyond that we get into the what people think it does, but there's never been any kind of study that I know of that proves anything. For example they will sometimes get credit for clearing green water which could be attributed to macroalgae growing on the trickle tower, other people attribute the clearing to bacteria. But these don't always clear green water. Trickle towers add more O2 to water than a Skippy. That would increase decomposition of suspended particles, improve fish health. However, good water movement within the pond would improve O2 much more, so I would say O2 improvement is just a side benefit. Although we don't understand a lot about how aqua systems work I do like that Trickle Towers and Bakki Showers are based on natural streams. A TT is just a compressed stream environment. High O2, media cleaned 24/7, fast moving water. So it's an environment that can support all the things nature provides, whatever that is, even if we don't understand it all. Streams are widely thought to improve water quality, both in what can be measured and for improvements attributed to streams since the beginning of mankind, whether deserved or not. The other thing I look to is what's happened in fish farming and high fish load Koi ponds over the past 15 or 20 years. Static submerged media filters (Skippy type) were once the most popular state of the art filters for these applications. But TT slowly replaced those filters and Bakki Shower filters have replaced TT. Today I doubt you could find a single fish farm, and very few high fish load Koi ponds, using static submerged media for bio filtering. At most static submerged media is used as pre filters and for settling but even that is being pushed out by sieve filters. There is just a bottom line in any combo filter, not just Skippy. Bead filters went through the exact same issue of initially thinking it was the perfect combo filter. The bacteria we consider "good" simply can't function in a muck accumulating environment. Easy to test, many studies. That we understand. But it is a perfect environment for the bacteria we consider "bad". No one has ever found a way around that. The best bio filters are always going to be high O2 and cleaned 24/7. Unless someone creates a new species of bacteria. The best mechanical filters are always going to be the ones that remove debris from the water column as quickly as possible and at the lowest cost. That's why sieve filters are the top mechanical filter today. Even bead filters today are considered poor mechanical filters. They trap debris sure, but have to be flushed daily which is expensive. Sieve removes debris from the water column immediately and are low cost to clean. Another way to look at it...say you wanted to create a perfect filter for growing "bad" bacteria, what would it look like? Skippy would be perfect. Low O2, constant source of new waste as food. More of a compositor than a filter.