We had a goal to move the koi into the pond by May 15th. That would be about two years after we started cutting down the first privets in this area. Unfortunately life interferes and we do have real day jobs. When I pout, the pond builder pointed out that our jobs fund the pond. The last two weeks we have been getting a lot more done inside the equipment house. The electrical has been set up but is not live pending an inspection and having the power company hook up the new meter. More about that sad story later…

Inside the equipment house the rotary drum filter bases have been built, RDFs placed and some of the valve work completed. We have installed the two bakki showers supported on the edge of the pond and a little steel reinforcement. This weekend the pond builder will be finishing the valves on the smaller RDF, mounting the ultraviolet lights and setting up the control boxes.

When we decided to put two bakki showers in the equipment house, we had to figure out a way for them to both flow past the edge of the pond. If both had the waterfall bottom piece, they just didn’t sit nicely in the equipment house. We ended up buying a third bakki shower with three holes and attaching some PVC to ensure the water would clear the edge. Since we never wanted to be able to see the bakki shower flow, we had to come up with a camouflage solution. We built a hood using the same cedar pieces used for the battens.

Moving the electrical meter base has been a little ordeal. While our electric guy could do it, the power company doesn’t like you to mess with their transformers. The power company told me that I had to buy a new meter box, get it inspected and then they would schedule a technician to come out and make it live. Of course you need a permit to get an inspection…and the inspection couldn’t be scheduled until the Friday before Memorial Day. Which means we cross our fingers that we will pass inspection and we can schedule Duke Energy to come out next week. All big maybes, all dragging our timetable down.

All things considered, we are making progress. Pond builder has turned into a nightly frog killer and we have added some chlorax bleach into the pond to kill the few hundreds of tadpoles. We have an eastern king snake and an eastern racer snake lurking around the pond area but no copperheads. Our new trees seem to be doing alright and our grass needs a lot of water with summer on our heels.

I had an idea about our current water flow and the pond builder made it work. I asked him if we could divert the overflow water that is just flowing out towards the gully into our new pond. So he rigged up a little sump pump and it nows pumps about 250 gallons of water a day into our new pond. Over two and a half weeks, that’s putting about 4000 gallons to use that was just going into the ground.

We’re pretty tired of the pond in the garage. It’s a little touchy to manage and it loves to act up when the pond builder is out of town. A few weeks ago we were in a trade show. The morning after we left, I’m checking our cameras – the pond is acting up. You could see the pond had stopped running and the water level was low. Thankfully our hay farmer went over, got some directions on the phone and spent a few hours refilling the pond. Our koi friend Steve also drove down to see if he could assist. Crisis resolved after a few hours but an outdoor pond tends to be a lot more stable.

Since the indoor pond is sensitive to changes in water level, I rarely turn off the RDF to observe the koi. This in turn has caused a little health problem in two of my koi. The water is usually moving a lot, I really don’t like to watch koi standing in the garage, so the end result was an ugly infection in both koi that I should have caught sooner. I suspect the two larger koi had a bruise on their right side which progressed into an infection. The showa was given an antibiotic shot a few weeks ago and did not seem to respond. I ended up giving her a second shot and her infection is slowly starting to heal. A larger problem was a budo goromo that had an infection where she had a patch of brown/red scales. I never really noticed it. She received an antibiotic shot about ten days ago and her infection looks like it might be improving. I will probably need to net them up to check against photos I took earlier. Meanwhile to be on the safe side we also did a potassium permanganate treatment of our indoor pond.

Next week I will be flying to Europe to be part of the judging team at the Euregio Koi Show in Oldenzaal. I’m very excited to meet the European koi keepers and apparently there is plenty of koi related stuff one might want to buy. I’ll post about this next time.

If all goes well, the pond builder might be loading our koi into the new pond while I am in Europe. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll close with a three minute slideshow of our pond build to date…