We have a pond in our rear garden, approx 12M x 8M, and the water is a coffee brown.has been for some time, there is fish in it, goldfish mainly. I want to clean the water and add a filtration system.
I have built a filter system, I did exactly the same in the UK and it works fine, but it won't clean the water.
Is it better to drain the pond and start over or is there some miracle potion I can add to the water to clean it..

I too would be intersted in this answer as my (much smaller) pond (2m x 1m) is getting greener and greener and I also wondered if there was a magic potion to add to the water to clean it up ?

Kudjap - Thats not a pond, its a lake !!! 12 metres long - wow!

No Paul the lake is on the other side, its 40M X 27m.................Now thats pretty clean, have no clue why the small one is so dirty..... I do know the bigger one is fed by a natural underground spring, perhaps that's the reason......

If your pond has no circulation and no shade it will turn green very quick. So shade and circulation of the water will do the job, remember inlets and outlets placed so you get a water current and get the water to drift around the pond.... It might be hard since you have quite a pond.

Seaserpent, we already tried circulating the water but it didn't make any difference to the colour of it, just moved it round a whole lot, got the fish a little giddy too I think..........lol We left it circulating, by use of a pump for 2 days continuous......

Coffee coloured water....is it a natural pond ?if so it maybe the mud/earth around the edges or bottom and/or a mixture of dead leaves/algea on the bottom, i have man made from concrete, now and again have a green problem i brought something from the fish place on wattana nuwong road an additive for the water, seemed to work for a while, a few years back sorry don't remember the name, UV filter may be the way to go on the green water problem and circulation(fountain/water fall), try a partial water change on the smaller ponds, and don't over feed the fish, shade is good.
my pond gets emptied and cleaned every 2 years. i don't have a bio-filter system.

Have a read thru this.....the bottom half deals with muddy waters caused by suspended clay particles

http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/wildlife/Fis ... /muddy.htm

Panick!!

Great link.. That gives me some ideas for my two 10X20 meter ponds that both are quite cloudy, probably due to clay suspensions in the water.

Did you say "goldfish"?

These are notoriously dirty fish. The tear up plants and stir up the sediment. Gold fish can grow to be large, beautiful fish, but if they are in anything but a sterile concrete pond, they are a real mess. I would not be surprised if you find that the problem does not clear itself up until you remove (or kill) all of the goldfish.

Then again, is brown water all that bad if you know that there are healthy fish thriving beneath its surface?

Most of them are indeed Goldfish and I don't know if they were thriving as we couldn't see them very well, also every morning and evening we saw them on the surface, well we saw their mouths anyway, looked like they were gasping for breath, yeah I know they don't breath as we do but thats what it looked like.

We actually pumped the water out, kept the goldfish in a neighbours pond, he had an empty pond after a fish BBQ fest, the non goldfish were put in our big pond, we've let the recent rain refill the pond and the water is still the same colour, so back to square one. The goldfish were a little pale in colour, thats for sure.

I guess brown water isn't bad but we want to make a feature out of the pond when we relandscape the ground in this area (when it stops raining), its about 6m outside our bedroom, we've just had double glass doors fitted in the bedroom and new patio laid so we can sit outside.

Was considering adding a waterfall to the pond for oxygenation but as I posted earlier we left a pump turning the water round for 2 days but it made no difference.

Kudjap, we have a small tub type pond, and I have been reading up on this recently through Google.

If the fish gasp at the surface that is a sign of lack of oxygen in the water, and suggested causes/solutions include:-

- the pond is getting too much sun, which reduces the oxygen the water can hold, - provide more shade and/or use a pump to aerate the water (or a waterfall would do that) and don't have too many fish in it.

Our water is clear, so sorry, I haven't researched that one.

Good Luck.

Thanx arjay, our neighbour also said the pond had too much sun and there's not enough oxygen, I wondered though why the other pond, the larger one, isn't suffering the same. I will get a pump or put in a waterfall to keep it aerated when we relandscape. I guess I can get a decent pump in any of the big stores....

I moved our "pond" round the back of the house, (it's like a big flower tub) where it gets much less sun. That seemed to work well and the pond plants still flower Ok.

One of the fish had babies the other day and the GF was running around really excited like she had had a baby herself!!!

As long as it keeps them happy, eh!!

Brown water and ornamental fish don't go well as you can't see them,i know its a big pond(12x8) but have you thought about starting again and lining it out in a good pvc pond liner, will almost certainly cure the muddy water problem.

If the opportunity presents itself to empty the pond again and your not inclined to line the bottom, take some of the sediment out (good for garden - a good 3-6 inches), and then cover the fresh soil with a sprinkling of lime powder, this destroys the majority of bacterial forms, the good stuff will remain unaffected.

Once the pond has been refilled (a pump with small solar panel is superb for this) will put plenty of oxygen into the ponds bio-cycle and the fish won't be gasping like a raspberry dangler at beer drinking time in the late afternoon.

This should leave your pond in better shape and reasonably clear, adding a few lily pad type vegetation will allow the fish to hide and spawn. After a couple of days the water should be tested for its Ph level, this should be done before emptying and then directly after filling, and then a couple of weeks after that to give a comparison and shed a bit of light on what's happening under the water.