maintenance

You may have to replace your bulb. Bulbs in UV’s have an effective usage life of 9 to 12 months. If you unplugged your UV during the winter months you extended it’s life. As a rule of thumb, a UV’s lamp should be replaced every year. The bulb loses power as it burns, therefore, it may still be lit but operating at 20% of its original power, rendering it ineffective for the purpose of killing algae. You’ll know when you need to replace your lamp simply by noticing that your UV is no longer clearing up the free-flowing algae.

The thousands of beads in any brand of bead filter, no matter how well it’s constructed, will eventually cake up, especially in ponds that are overloaded with fish and plants. As odd as it seems, plants in a pond add more dirt and debris to the water than fish alone. An overabundance of string algae can literally glue the beads together after a season of use. If your bead filter is needing to be backwashed more than once a week it’s time for maintenance.

Early spring is the perfect time to clean and perform maintenance on your biological filter. During winter the water is too cold for nitrifying bacteria to live and they go dormant. As water temperatures heat up nitrobacter and nitrosomonas, the two “good” bacteria begin to colonize. If you clean your filters with chlorinated water the chlorine can prohibit the growth of these two beneficial bacteria — especially nitrobacter which, of the two, is the slowest to grow.

Now that spring is just around the corner it’s time to begin the loving task of opening up the pond. The transition of winter to spring can be tricky for the fish. Parasites and anaerobic (bad) bacteria thrive in cool waters before the fish have had time to build up their immunity. Aerobic (good nitrifying) bacteria take their time to establish in the biological filter so we run the risk of deadly ammonia and nitrite build-up in the pond during this time of year.