With so many pond skimmers on the market today, which one do you choose? After 20 years in the trenches servicing and installing well over a dozen different pond skimmers, I decided to compile a list of all the pros and cons on a chalkboard for evaluation. In doing so, it became crystal clear I needed to design a new INNOVATIVE product specific to my needs and approach to pond construction.
I wanted a heavy duty, super rugged skimmer that’s easy to conceal in the landscape! This skimmer needed to be user friendly for submersible and external pump applications while being super efficient at creating surface tension, capable of handling a great deal of leaf debris and most important, fish safe! With the critical needs identified and a quote from Plato, “Necessity, is the Mother of Invention”, I set out to accomplish a goal.
Let me introduce you to The Helix™ Pond Skimmer, the next generation in Pond Skimmers! 35″ Tall x 19″ Wide x 18″ Long – This compact footprint is easy to disguise in the landscape. The Helix can handle a wide range of flow rates from 1500 gph to 8000 gph. With this wide range of flow rates it gives you extreme flexibility in your pond’s life support systems and design. Designed for use with submersible or external pump installations, this new pre-filter provides great versatility in pump selection.
The Helix is a fish friendly pre-filter designed for optimal surface skimming. The 12” wide mouth of the skimmer opening leading to the area around the circular weir is a “no trap zone” for your pond fish. The Helix boasts a 15″ circular, self-leveling, floating weir.
This compact circular weir competes with the largest skimmers on the market for optimum surface tension. A full 15 inches of surface tension within a specific diameter and an 8″ round x 8″ deep durable Debris Basket give The Helix a vacuum like effect that is capable of capturing a ton of wind blown debris and is super easy to clean.
Excellent for all styles of pond construction – Use The Helix for water gardens, koi ponds, lakes and hybrid ponds. The Helix is equipped with Stainless Steel Hardware meaning you’ll have no worries about hardware rusting if you need to salt your pond.Whatever style of construction you choose, liner, polyurea or concrete construction, The Helix will exceed your expectations while keeping your fish free from harm.
The Helix Pond Skimmer Pre-Filter is manufactured in the USA with a heavy-duty rotational molded HDPE material – This pond skimmer is SUPER RUGGED, overflow compatible with flat spots on the round body for plumbing an efficient overflow up to 2″ in diameter and is automatic water fill valve friendly. The Helix is roomy enough for the installation of a float valve without your typical issues of malfunction.
The unique design is perfect for AIR LIFT skimming applications. In Fact, you may see Airlift skimmer installations become commonplace for maximum energy efficiency.
Easy to install – Easy to maintain – Easy to see why we believe The Helix Pond Skimmer will set a new standard for skimming ponds. This is what people are saying about our new pond skimmer.
“The Helix Pre-Filter is the most innovate pond skimmer I’ve seen on the market in the last 6 years!” – Randy Stewart, UnitLiner.com – Shawnee, Oklahoma
“This skimmer is so simple and sweet. I wish I would have thought of it!” – Kent Wallace, Living Water Solutions – Las Vegas, Nevada
“I think you have a real winner in this skimmer!” “I can hardly wait to get my hands on them!” – Mike White, White Water Filters – Batavia, Illinois
“We’re super impressed with the performance of The Helix Skimmer on our pond!” “I’m excited to offer this clever & innovative new product to our customer base” “I have no doubt it will meet the demands of the discriminating buyer.” – Bill DeBrosky – In Motion Aquatics & Mystic Koi – Upland California
Get a Helix Pond Skimmer here: http://www.theponddigger.com/supplies/Skimmers-Fish-Friendly-Skimmers/c8_86/p831/The-HELIX-Pond-Skimmer/product_info.html
Pond Related MOLD Hits Southern California
Heads up all you pond peoples! We landed our MOLD from the tooling company for The Pond Digger Brand Skimmer late last night as scheduled! The MOLD is being seasoned as we speak and it looks like we are right on target to REVEAL the first skimmer off the production line at this week’s Pond Contractor Focus Group!
MARCH TEN, TWENTY TWELVE’S Pond Contractor Focus Group will be anything and everything about POND SKIMMERS! Expect to be deep in discussion about skimming ponds.
Which manufactured brand pond skimmers have you installed?
Which brand pond skimmer is your favorite?
What brand skimmer is your least favorite?
Which skimmer holds the most debris?
Which skimmer installs the fastest?
Which skimmer is the most cost effective?
We will be discussing all the pros and cons of pond skimmers in the market place today. I plan to cover pond skimming philosophies, pond skimmer speed limits, installation tips, installation tricks, both basic & advanced plumbing techniques and I will show you how to run a super efficient pond skimmer with only 40 watts of energy! See how we’re running pond skimmers with flow rates up to 6000 gallons per hour with the use of an air pump!
This is not just a ME TO SKIMMER. Expect the unexpected. Don’t expect another skimmer box like the dozen other pond skimmers on the market today. I’m confident The Pond Digger Brand skimmer will stand up as a leading brand in the industry.
Very Special Thanks to Both Mike White and Kent Wallace for data and support in critical pieces in the design of this skimmer.
See you Saturday, March 10, 2012!!
Focus on Business Fundamentals once a month with Eric Triplett
Plan on meeting up at The Pond Digger headquarters the Second Saturday of every month bright and early for round table training sessions. Collaborate with other landscape contractors on how to grow your business. Focus on your business for 2 hours uninterrupted each month with a group of guys dedicated to improving their businesses.
We shut off the phones; grab a cup of coffee and talk about marketing, bidding, business and much more. We’ll get down to the basics but plan on bending your mind and learning about new products and sharing ideas to grow your business.
What you can expect. Good conversation, product reviews, manufacturer discounts, gift certificates, guest speakers, training, training and more training. Let’s learn together. Let’s grow together.
LOCATION:
The Pond Digger Headquarter
31710 Dunlap Blvd.
Yucaipa, Ca 92399
(800) 522-5043
DATE: March 10th, 2012
TIME: 7am to 9am
DOOR PRIZE: Someone at this month’s focus group will receive a Pond Digger Skimmer as a Door Prize!
BREAKFAST:
Served between 8am and 9am – We will be BBQing sausage breakfast sandwiches on the Weber Charcoal Grill!
RSVP:
Not mandatory to RSVP I know how contractors get busy. Just show up if you want but if you call or email to let us know you’ll be showing up we won’t run out of coffee and breakfast sandwiches.
Eric Triplett
The Pond Digger
Understanding Spring Pond Care
Spring is sneaking up on us quick this year! Before you know it, you’ll be enjoying the outdoors and all the wonder and excitement of your beautiful pond again. That brings us to the topic of preparing your pond for spring. Mother Nature has a fantastic way of preparing her natural bodies of water for each new season by flooding waterways with fresh rains and melting snow, recycling old water out and refreshing it with new.
In your rock and gravel eco-system ponds this service needs to be provided manually on an annual basis to help maintain its balance. This means; you’ve got to get in there, drain the pond, rinse the gravel, remove any heavy debris that may have accumulated during fall and while you’re at it, clean the biological waterfall filter, thin out your aquatic plants, and replace the light bulbs your underwater lighting systems, among other things; all while ensuring the safety of your fish and other pond inhabitants.
Advanced ponds with supped up life support systems including aeration systems, UV clarifiers, Bio-Mechanical filters, Back Flushable Waterfall Filters, bottom drains, settlement tanks and such, the SPRING POND CARE procedures are much less painful and cost substantially less than traditional rock and gravel eco-system ponds. However there are many chores that shouldn’t be overlooked like replacing UV bulbs and cleaning quartz sleeves, inspecting air intakes and diaphragms on your air pumps, and the list of to do’s and don’t goes on.
Four Spring Pond Care Essentials Your Pond Needs Annually!
1. Livestock Evaluation – It’s important to take a serious look at your fish population each and every year. It only takes about three years for a new pond owner to begin putting a strain on a pond’s life support system without even realizing it.
In the third year of pond ownership your Koi should start to put on some size (and mass) if you’re doing things right. A 26” Koi can have 8 times the body mass of a 13” Koi. Yes believe it or not, a Koi that doubles in length can put on 8 times the mass! Imagine the food consumption and waste byproduct produced if all the Koi in your pond were suddenly 26”? How would that affect your maintenance and water treatment routines?
Much to often a pond owner will continue to do the same routine from day one of their pond, in the 3rd, 4th and 5th year. This is when things can start to go really wrong. Evaluation your livestock population each spring so you can make minor or major adjustments each year and enjoy your Koi as they mature in to majestic beauties.
2. Water Treatment Evaluation – Beneficial Bacteria, Barley Straw Extract, Algae Fix, Koi Clay, Flocculant, Pond Salt, and the list goes on. What treatments are you doing and how often? I’ve evaluated ponds for clients and have found entire cabinets full of different water treatment products all being used at the same time! Find clarity in your water treatment selection and in turn find clarity in your pond.
If your pond is heavily populated you might find that increasing your beneficial bacteria doses will help manage your water quality. You might find that when your Koi attain 18” you can reduce algae care products because an 18” Koi can eat a serious amount of string algae!
Did you know the use a Flocculant or Koi Clay could improve your pond’s water clarity in a big way! Reviewing your water treatment usage each spring is a great way to make improvements in your water quality.
3. Review Feeding Schedule Routines, Serving Sizes and Total Annual Poundage – Give this one some thought; think back to when you pond was brand new when you first populated your pond with Koi. Do you remember how much fish food you went through in your first pond season? Your Koi where still a bit shy and they we only a few inches long.
Chances are, you went through a pound or two of food in that first season. As your pond matures, so do the Koi and in the second season you certainly doubled or tripled that amount of food offerings. Before you know it you are into your third season, your Koi are even bigger, eat much more than last year and to top it off have become sexually active!
By the fourth season your Koi are pushing 2’ long and have 50 or 60 offspring swimming around the pond and they’re eating you out of house and home. I actually have a client with a 6000-gallon pond that purchased 250 pounds of fish food last year! That’s crazy when you think about it! It’s important to realize massive jumps that can creep up on you and understand the demand this can have on your maintenance and water treatment routines.
4. Life Support System Inspection – Biological filters, UV filters, aeration systems, ion generators, sieve filters, settlement tanks, bottom drains, check valves, knife valves, 3-way valves, filter pads, skimmer nets & pads… Now take a deep breathe! Go about it one step at a time and evaluate each component of your life support system.
Ponds are exposed to a great deal each year with the seasonal changes, population explosions and such. I’ve seen bio-mechanical filters so overloaded with pond muck that they barely even worked, and the homeowner didn’t even realize it.
Replace UV lamps, repair diaphragms on air pumps, replace old filter pads on your mechanical filters, replace holey skimmer nets and lava rock media bags. You get the picture now, right? Do a physical inspection of your life support each spring and rest easy while enjoying your pond the rest of the year.
It’s a dirty job, but somebody has got to do it! It’s really not as hard as it sounds and for the “Down and Dirty”, do-it-yourselfers that are a little nervous, The Pond Digger will be hosting a FREE Spring Pond Care Seminar at our headquarters in March. Let us personally walk you through spring pond care procedures and other routine maintenance to build your confidence for this task.
If you don’t want to get your hands dirty then have no fear, The Pond Digger has started scheduling work orders for Spring Pond Care and we’ll be flooding into your neighborhood soon! That will leave more time for you to plant your annual spring flowers and prepare for the barbeque Pond Party planning for family and friends; don’t forget to send us an invitation, too!
I hope everyone has it figured it out by now; The Pond Digger is not your ordinary Landscape Contractor. We are fish freaks turned Landscape Contractor, and Landscape Contractor turned Pond Digger! We are constantly striving for excellence in our field with continuous research and development. This enables us to make educated improvements on our product line, thus helping you with the maintenance and health care concerns of your pond and it inhabitants.
Our efforts benefit you because we love to share our knowledge. 2007 was a benchmark year for The Pond Digger Waterscape Design & Construction Company. We debuted our very own line of PROFESSIONAL STRENGTH water treatments, and PREMIUM fish foods! Stay tuned as we reveal The Pond Digger Brand pond skimmer and waterfall filter this Spring!
To secure a spot on our clean out calendar contact our office at (800)-522-5043 to be placed on our waiting list. Be sure to leave a daytime number so that one of our maintenance techs can contact you to review your spring POND CARE work order if necessary.
We’ve worked hard to gain your business and we’re working even harder, to maintain it. The finest compliment we could ever receive is a referral from you! If your have neighbors, friends and family that are constantly at your place marveling over your pond, PLEASE give me their names so I can build one for them too and get them out of your hair!
Out of Control Algae is not hard to achieve. I’m talking about pond algae seriously taking over you pond. Beautiful, florescent green string algae so long and thick you could sell it to The Aliens for wigs!
Pond algae so out of control you can walk across the pond on algae is what I’m talking about! Are you jealous of someone you know with so much pond scum and algae that the Creature from the Black Lagoon might actually live in their pond ready to emerge from the depths to do some bodily damage to the neighborhood?
I can literally teach you how to grow such dark shades of suspended green single-cell algae that you can reduce the visibility in your pond to less than an inch, so you don’t even have to see your prized koi fish! Imagine a pond so dense with pond scum & algae that on a cool morning at the break of dawn you see steam rising from the pond!
Converting a crystal clear and clean pond to a pond dominated and controlled by algae does not take much work. In fact, several items on our list of the Top Ten Things you can do to promote out of control algae in your pond involve doing absolutely nothing at all!
The Top Ten List of things you can do to get the algae in your pond to grow out of control. Guaranteed!
1. OVERFEED YOUR FISH! This is one really fun thing you can do to toss your pond out of balance real quick and promote the growth of some out of control algae. Feed you fish massive quantities of fish food three, four, five times a day. In fact leave the fish food in an easily accessible location right next to the pond so it’s easy for your family and friends to overfeed the fish too!
If you’re going away for the weekend, feed your fish EXTRA before you leave and then EXTRA when you get back. After you finish feeding the fish each morning toss a couple more random handfuls of fish food into the pond so the fish have something to eat while you’re at work. In fact, the more uneaten fish food you have floating around in the pond the better if you are looking to promote the growth of pond algae.
2. OVERSTOCK YOUR POND with Koi, mosquito fish, turtles, goldfish, tadpoles, frogs and hope for babies! This is also extremely fun to do! Buy as many fish as you think your pond can support and then buy a few more for good measure! No one likes a pond with a conservative amount of fish in the pond, right! Over stock it!
When you finally do have hundreds of baby fish in your pond commit to not giving away any of them! Name each and everyone of the baby fish! The more fish the better for promoting a great environment for pond algae that is difficult to manage!
3. DON’T DO WATER CHANGES! If you follow through with step one and two you will be promoting amazingly poor water quality. By NOT performing any water changes, algae will go crazy! String alga is one of Mother Nature’s ways of trying to manage water quality. If you do water changes you will be reducing phosphates and nitrates.
Pond Algae is dependant on phosphates and nitrates for optimal growth and vibrant color. If you get in a little routine and start actually doing small water changes on a monthly basis your water quality would constantly be improving and pond algae would be sad, so don’t do water changes if you are looking to grow fantastic pond algae!
4. DON’T CLEAN YOUR FILTERS! Ignore, neglect, forget, avoid, overlook, and or pay absolutely NO attention to your pond filters! Filters capture and collect pond scum, debris and muck. If you clean your filters regularly you will be reducing the necessary fuel to grow luscious pond algae.
5. DON’T INSTALL A POND SKIMMER ON YOUR POND! Pond skimmers capture surface debris in your pond, including but not limited to leaves, pollen, dust, uneaten fish food and other suspended organic debris. If you don’t have a skimmer then these excess organics will have the opportunity to become water logged, sink to the bottom of the pond and become FUEL for your beloved pond algae.
6. DO NOT INSTALL AQUATIC PLANTS! If you want The Swamp Thing Monster to come and live in your pond, DO NOT put aquatic plants in your pond and you will grow pond algae like crazy! Aquatic plants consume nitrates and excess nutrients in your pond. If you have a nice balance of aquatic plants in your pond then how in the world do you plan on growing massive quantities of string algae? The aquatic plants will be competing with your pond algae for fuel!
7. DON’T BLOCK THE SUN! Provide your pond with as much sun as possible! Algae love the sun so if you are looking to grow top quality pond algae then bring on the sun! No shade trees, no water lilies or floating aquatic plants! More sun equals a warmer pond and the warmer the water the better your algae will grow!
8. FEED DIRT CHEAP KOI FOOD! That’s right; don’t feed a real deal premium fish food to your koi if you want to grow pond algae like crazy! Buy the cheapest fish food you can get your hands on. You know the cheap koi food that sometimes clouds the water when you over feed your pond. Get the cheap koi STICKS that crush in your fingers like Cheetos. The floating koi sticks get wet & gooey when the koi chew them up and the food ends up squirting out their gills during feeding and the remnants of the koi stick goo end up on the bottom of your pond where pond algae can start to use it to grow like crazy!
9. TURN YOUR PUMPS OFF AT NIGHT! Oh this is a good one if you want to grow the best pond algae on the planet! You see when your filters are running on your pond they become a living organism that helps you manage pristine conditions in your water quality. When you turn your filter pumps off in the evening then the living filter dies. In the morning when you turn your pumps and filters back on you will be pumping all the DEAD organics from the filters into the pond and your pond algae will love it! Each morning your filter will try and regenerate into a living organism but by turning your pumps and filters off each night then you will never truly have a living & breathing life support system to combat algae.
10. DO STEPS 1 THROUGH 9 ALL AT ONCE and I promise you will grow the most amazing pond algae the planet has ever seen!
If you wish to thank me for sharing my successful recipes for growing the ultimate out of control algae, please send photos of you and your algae. Your success is my reward!