I apologize if you have mentioned before but how do you winter your fish? I lost all mine this year so am after some tips. Same with des if he sees this. Tia

Looks great!! I've had spent mothers day getting my waterfall an pond back online..... Love this time of year. We had 6 baby fish overwinter :lol:

Hmm, that kinda depends what you consider a "decent" price :lol: I've noticed over the years that Koi prices are all over the place. There are inexpensive "mutts" that are still attractive but not "show quality". Then there are true "show quality" koi that are insanely priced. Anyway, the best selection of koi in Calgary so far is the big box store. They have some pretty big koi. Again, I don't know if you'd consider them decent priced or not :-) Most of my koi I got a few years ago when they were 6"-8" and ranged in price from $11 to $100. A baby koi can easily double in size in a year! Feed them good high quality high protein food a lot and they will grow big and fast!

Sorry to hear about your loss :( It's tough to lose koi because they are so personable. I over winter my fish outside in the pond and have been donig this for 4 years now with great success. For me, what has worked out well is to keep the surface of the pond agitated and moving, over the winter. This alone helps to keep the pond from freezing solid. On the colder days and nights the pond will still freeze down about 2 to 3" but this is a good thing. It helps to insulate the pond and keep windchill from continuing to cool and freeze the pond. The pump in the pond moving the water under the 3" of ice helps to keep the pond from freezing solid. Kinda like how parts of the river don't freeze over the winter because it's moving. In addition to this, it is very very very important to float a de-icer on your pond. You can buy pond de-icer's at your LFS. Note that these are simply meant to keep a small hold in the ice and not to warm the entire pond! This helps to keep a hole in the ice so that gas can escape from the pond. And finally one other thing I make sure of is that the very bottom of the pond, at 24" down is not disturbed by the pump. The fish will huddle down there over the winter and hibernate. It's warmest down there thanks to the heat of the ground. You don't want to mix water that's down there with water from the upper part of the pond that's colder. When I circulate the pond water with my winter pump I place it at the top 1 foot shelf in my pond (where my marginal plants normally sit).

Something else that I've done in the past as well is to build a hoop house over top of the pond. It's essentially a PVC tube structure (the frame), with clear pvc plastic draped over it. This acts as a green house for the pond over the winter and worked out well. However, it is added maintenance to set it up every fall and take it down every spring. Both methods (with and without the hoop house) worked for me.

Hope that helps.

Do you lose a lot to evaporation over the winter? The air is so dry here..

Actually no, I don't find that I lose much water at all. I think once the ice forms over the pond that helps to keep the wind off of it which cuts down on evap.

My regime is slightly different than Kien's. I take the styrofoam out of the floating deicer heater and let it sink to the bottom. It only kicks on at 7c. Then I run an airstone on the first shelf 2 ft away from the heater which brings the warmer water up. I keep the air pump in the shed and cover in with a large Rubbermaid container and blanket so that the heat that the pump generates stays in the Rubbermaid and gets pumped to the pond. I do not run a water pump. When it gets really cold, I will shovel snow onto the frozen surface to help insulate the whole pond. This has worked well for the past 2 winters since I've had my big pond.

Kien,
What type of filter media do you use? Can you show us a couple pictures of the filter system?

My filtration is fairly simple. It amounts to a giant canister filter built by Laguna called a Pressure Flo.

http://www.aquapetbargain.com/photo/...ond-Filter.jpg

I have a pond pump that sucks up water and debris from the bottom of the pond and pushes it into the canister filter. The canister filter has foam pads for mechanical filtration. It also contains bioballs for biological filtration. It also has a UV sterilizer built in to nuke algae spores.

I also have bio balls in my water fall. In addition, this year I am installing an in-pond skimmer that skims the surface for debris like leaves and dead plants. I've managed to get by the past few years without a skimmer but having one will make your life a lot easier. I am constantly netting/scooping gunk like dead leaves off the bottom of the pond. This is fairly important because there is no clean up crew in the pond! Those dead leaves will just rot down there. A pond skimmer (either in-pond or out of pond) will go a long ways in helping to keep this debris from accumulating in your pond.

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/xHm7GcaUJag/hqdefault.jpg

I've read that ideally the pump should be able to pump half of the pond's volume every hour. Does that apply to all the pumps? What brand of pump would you recommend or use?

ya, that's a good rule of thumb. In the case of ponds and koi husbandry, definitely the more the better. Koi are messy fish! As an example, my canister filter (Pressure Flo) and its accompanying pump (Laguna max-flow) is rated for 3200 gallons per hour. My pond is roughly 1000g. The pump has worked flawlessly for 3 years now.

http://www.transaquariumsonline.com....a%20maxflo.jpg

In the winter I take my canister filter off-line and store it, but I keep the pump on to circulate and move the water in the pond. The canister filter is not needed in the winter because the fish don't eat so they don't generate much waste and algae is dormant so there's not much to clean.

This is just one of many different methods of filtration. I also maintain a pond at my parents house and there they use an above ground box/water fall filter.

http://www.lagunaponds.com/lagunaeng...rfalls5000.jpg

It works just as well. The key is, whatever you decide to use, make sure it's easy for you to maintain. My canister filter is nice because it has a backwash port which I can dial to when I need to flush out the filter pads. Then there are handy handles that I plunge on the filter that I can use to clean the pads of debris. The gunk gets washed out of the canister and into my garden/flow beds.