How Using 2 Fish Pond-Pumps Saves Lots of Money

Bet you find this hard to believe, don't you? Well for almost all ponds with fish and with a waterfall it is perfectly true. Here's why ...

When you also have a waterfall you need to pump water to it only intermittently (say day time or just weekends) and here's where the opportunity lies.

It costs money to run a pump and if the pump is being run when not necessary then obviously energy is being wasted. In most small to medium sized ponds the water flow to the waterfall exceeds that needed to maintain good viability in the filter. If this is true the energy can be saved by running a small pump 24/7 to the pond filter only and the larger waterfall pump can run only when necessary to power the waterfall.

Of course the second pump costs money to buy but generally the cost is far less than say 2 years savings you will achieve by only running the waterfall pump on occasions.

If you can save £25 per year and buy a suitable small pump for £40 then it makes good economic sense to buy the second pump because it takes less than 2 years to get the money back from energy savings that you initially spent buying the second pump. And ...

There's another BIG advantage ... you always have a back pump for your filter and this will ensure complete filter bacteria viability 24/7/365.

Check pump running costs and do your calculations ... refer here for running costs and also check out the free  calculators.

I have created 12 different pond calculators and these are available free at my other site Perfect Pond Keeping One of the calculators allows you to accurately specify any pond pump even taking pipe friction losses into account. I would suggest you get these Excel calculators and play around with them.

REMEMBER ...

Pond filters serve 2 purposes and the more important of these 2 by far is the water purification or cleaning stage. The second purpose is to assist in removing suspended solids (although no filter will remove green suspended algae particles because they are so very tiny). Without good pond filtration your pond will sooner or later become a death trap for your fish. Learn about pond-filters here.

Pond Keeping Units

Now we've started to talk litres you might find this table below useful. It helps to translate one set of units to another quite easily.

Example ... 1 cu.m per minute is the same as 1,000 litres per minute or 35.32 cu.ft per min or 220 imperial gallons per minute.

Factors to be aware of with all pumps. This is a good page to read before you buy any pump.