I know, I can't believe I didn't take pictures of the whole process! I always take pictures of stuff. As I was constructing the filter thingy I was thinking that I should be taking pictures and making a whole instructional web page for it. But there are other instructional pages out there. But yeah, I will take some pics of the pond and filter tomorrow. Until then, here's a video I took yesterday of my six new fish! They are the first fish to be in the pond, and they seem to like it. They are really tame; you can even sort of hold them. :) Here is a link that might be useful: Katy's six new goldfish video . . .

Being a new pool owner, I'm still finding out what everything does and how it works. So when our new pool got muddy from a small "landslide" (read: unlandscaped yard!), I had to turn to the experts for what to do. (That would be this forum!) We bought a back up filter, and ran, ran, ran that pump, changed the filter, cleaned the filter and started all over again. I didn't really know just what that filter did...now I do!!!! I truly thought at one point we would just have to drain the pool, it was that bad. But diligent filtering and a very caring pool guy, and we are back up and swimming. Thanks for the expertise that was offered here...I'll be checking in often as I learn the ropes of pool ownership! Here's my pool BEFORE the landslide: Then here we are with the mud puddle: and finally, after the clean up:

don't worry. we were told to run our pump 24/7 for the first 5 weeks after our new pebbletec...the electric bill wasn't too terribly high.

I was not familiar with OASE pumps but one I chose at random seemed very nice and must have been a mag drive pump since wattage was very low (if honest value). The rotor on these just pull out, probably with part of the outer housing or bearing. It would certainly be worth taking it apart. For one thing, you could simply have a bunch of vines tangled up in there. I usually clean mine out once a year or so. The vines will stop motion, but at least in my case, that didn't damage the pump.