MCrossley
Koi Lover
Mar 22, 2005, 9:13 AM
Post #1 of 8
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Planning to build indoor pond in new Arizona Home, need some advce.
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Hello I am new to the forums and although been out of the hobby for about 7 years not unfamiliar with it at all. When I was 13 I built a rather large concrete pond that was about 15' x 15' and was kidney shaped. That pond was in service for 10 years and survived 2 major earthquakes before my grandparents sold that house. I made some mistakes but all in all it was a great enjoyment and had many koi that lived for a good long time. Now I am planning building my own home on property already purchased and would like some advice let me give you some thoughts on what I want to do and the constraints that I have to work with.
Location: The new home will be in Northern Arizona at a elevation of about 6000' and the average high during summer being about 91 and average winter being in the low 20's. The pond will be indoors in a corner of the main living room area with a ceiling height of approximately 12' and would like to make the length around 10-12' on the inner wall and maybe about 6-8' on the exterior wall in either a kidney or l-shaped design.
Design: I am considering a 3' depth unless anyone would recommend a deeper one. I want a large corner waterfall probably pretty high cascading down out of natural rock. The room-side will either be flat rock topped or some type of hard natural surface.
The Problems: This home will be 100% off-grid from utilities and will be solely powered by Solar, wind and generator. This is not so much a problem, rather a consideration to think about filters and what not being tied together with gravity feed to reduce amount of pumps to run. I have found several DC powered pumps for the job so battery direct will not be a problem for me so outages are not something I am worried about; I have a big background in power systems and uninterruptible power. Next problem is temperature, I am not sure these days what the optimum temp would be for an indoor pond; I will not have air conditioning but will have swamp cooling as well as radiant floor heating and cooling in the concrete slab itself.
My questions: So after much reading I am interested to get some ideas on what types of filtration I should use and which will be most efficient. My old pond had a lava rock type home made filter that worked well but also added a full sized pool pump style pump and sand filter system that worked great for clarity but had to be backwashed weekly (not into that again) I am thinking along the lines of a vortex pre-filter and then trickle filter with a setup like one of the members here posted (image attached) So I was thinking of an outdoor access enclosure that could be the backside of the water fall wall and ll of the filters and pumps be located there so that the final output being the waterfall. Another question I have is water capacity, what do you guys think the pond would hold if it were say 6'w x 10' x 3' deap?
My abilities: I am very capable of building this myself and designing my own filters and what not but want some design ideas based on what I have stated here. I have access to some good companies that make plastic "food grade" tubs and containers for the filters which by the way not sure if anyone has thought about one of these for their vortex filters. (attached)
Thanks to everyone for your time to read and give your input here it is much appreciated; I rather start thinking about the design integration into the house now before the house is even built than go gee wish I had a door there later.
(This post was edited by MCrossley on Mar 22, 2005, 9:28 AM)
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. I love the idea of yours i can just imajine this tropical cavetype atmosphere.