Water Garden Pumps

Water garden pumps are essential if you want to run a fish pond filter or a water fountain. There are also several ways of powering water garden pumps: mains, battery and solar power. You will need to pay close attention to the capacity of the water garden pumps that you are considering buying.

Water Garden Pumps

It is necessary to use water garden pumps if the body of water you are dealing with is under a certain size. A large body of water, a large pond or small lake will contain everything it needs to produce a self-sustaining ecosystem, but the smaller your pond becomes, the more help it will need in algae control from water garden pumps.

This is because a small pond will have unnatural proportions of fish or other aquatic animals, plants, surface area and volume of water. There is also usually less natural movement of the water by wind. Therefore, you have to help redress the balance and one of the best ways of doing this is by the use of water garden pumps to improve water circulation and quality.

There are three basic types of electric water garden pumps and these are:

Feature Pumps: are small pumps that are designed to circulate water to pebble pool fountains, garden ornaments and small self contained features. Feature pumps are not really suitable for use in a garden pond because of the size of the pre filter. A lot of models come with pre-selected fountain attachments as standard.

General Purpose Pumps: are all round water garden pumps, which have been designed to run fountains, waterfalls and filters all at the same time. They quite frequently come complete with a variety of fountain jets and because of this, many now have a pre-filter to prevent small pieces of debris from clogging the jets.

These submersible water garden pumps are ideal for most small to medium sized water garden ponds. General purpose pumps are great for fountains.

Solids-Handling Water Pumps: as the name suggests, these powerful water garden pumps are designed to allow fairly large soft solids, like pieces of reed, lily or clumps of weed to pass through without clogging. This makes these water garden pumps perfect for filtration purposes, because they will deliver debris straight to the filter. However, they will also run waterfalls as they rarely clog and seldom need maintenance.

Due to the design of these water garden pumps, they are not suitable for running fountains, because they will clog the jets up. It is fairly standard practice for water gardeners and pond lovers to use one of these pumps to send water to the waterfall-cum-filtration unit 24 hours a day and then use a general purpose pump to operate a fountain which can be switched off when it is no longer needed.

When choosing your water garden pumps, you should take into consideration the volume of water in your pond and the capacity or through-put of your water garden pumps.

For example, if your pond holds twenty-five cubic metres of water and your water garden pumps have a capacity of 1,000 litres per hour, your pond water will be cleaned about once a day by your water garden pumps.

Your pump(s) will be used for the circulation of water through biological filters which will aid algae control without removing beneficial bacteria, which benefit koi or other aquatic animals and aquatic plants.

Water garden and fountain pumps are essential for the maintenance of water quality, so the only remaining question is how do you run them?

There are many water garden and fountain pumps on the market and they are all electric, mostly mains electricity, but you can also get an alternative pond and garden device - a solar powered pond pump.This would save on installation costs and energy consumption.