UPGRADE TO HELIX

When it comes to your pond, what you plan for may not be where you end up. People often start with a small, plastic pond from a big box store, because they want just a couple of fish, and then they are calling me, panicked and yelling, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED?!?!??! MY POND IS GREEN AND I CAN’T CLEAR IT UP!!!???!”

After my ear stops ringing, and I get them calmed down, I ask the usual list of questions; how many fish, and how big are they, how old is the pond, what size pump and filter do you have, how often and how much do you feed, what’s your maintenance schedule?

About 98.3% of the time, they say, my pond is 3 years old, with 1,000 gallons, and I have 462,398 fish. :O Just kidding, but they are grossly overpopulated for their pond equipment. Because, although they really meant to stick with 2 koi, they are so small in the beginning, and surely 2 more won’t hurt, and then they saw a new color, and just one more, and then they got a koi for their birthday, and now, there are 462,398 koi in their tiny, made for only two fish, pond.

Now, naturally, they can’t give up any koi, because, “Would you give up your children?” And of course, the pond can’t be made larger because of city code, or there is a house in the way, or the neighbors won’t let you use any of their yard, so bigger is not an option. There is only one thing to do. Add filtration.

The beauty of Helix is that it is easy to add filtration. If you are only a little excessive with the koi, you can add extra media to the Helix Moving Bed Waterfall filter, the Helix Bio Mechanical Reactor, or the Helix Bio Mech X. This gives the pond a boost in filtration almost immediately, and helps to reduce ammonia and nitrite. Ammonia and nitrite can get dangerously high from being overstocked, and the corresponding overfeeding that happens with being overstocked. And don’t say “I don’t overfeed”, we already know you’re excessive, look how many fish you have!

If you still can’t relate, imagine this. Your first automobile purchase. Most likely, you got something small and cute; a little sports car, or a two-door coupe, or maybe even a motorcycle. Now, look at your car today; big enough to tote around the kids, your significant other, the dog, (in my case it was 2 kids, a dog, two pigs, and a goat, because Eric wouldn’t let me haul the mini horse in the truck ;p)., and maybe some neighborhood children.

Can you imagine trying to live your life in that first tiny car you had? There’d be feet, and legs, and tongues hanging out of it everywhere. As your family grew, you upgraded your car to grow along with it, because you could plainly see that you, your spouse, and two kids wouldn’t fit in a little deuce coupe.

Although it is more difficult to see with your pond, (after all, the fish can still swim around in there, so they must be fine), the biological load that the fish are producing can quickly become much greater than the load the filtration was originally designed for.

This is something to consider, as your pond ages, the fish grow, either in mass or quantity, and the water starts to lose that crisp clarity. Long before the pond is green, and the panicked call, remember that little car, and upgrade your filter.

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