Hello I have a water feature with many waterfalls and a pond at the bottom.My husband built it. He made the pond so the grandkids could wade in it.He died 3 years ago and the pond is suffering! I don’t have a clue how many gallons. The pond is about 15’ X 10’ but he put crates in and dug trenches so the water below wouldn’t freeze. I have algae and I was using chlorine powder but it left a white film. I need to know what works on algae.
Welcome
@Dinah Monahan to the GPF. I'm going to suggest you start a new post so your question won't get buried here in this thread. (
@addy1 is it possible to move this to a new thread? Or does Dinah need to start one herself?)
I'm sorry to hear about your husband. I'm sure it's daunting to take over a pond under the circumstances, but you can do it! Lots of us here are women pond keepers - and a few of us have even built our own ponds, so there's lots of experience here to draw on.
If your pond measurements are correct, and figuring an average depth of 2.5 feet (just a guess) you have around 2500 gallons or so.
Can you tell us a bit more about your pond, like do you have fish? Is there any kind of filtration, maybe in the waterfall box? If so, do you every clean the filter media?
In general terms, algae is caused by excess nutrients in the pond - too many fish, too few plants, over feeding the fish, etc. SOME algae is important - all healthy ponds have algae. But too much is unsightly and can take away from the beauty of a pond. There are products you can use to kill algae, but it's better in the long run to address the cause of the algae rather than treat it as a symptom to be "cured".
What kind of algae do you have? Is it long and stringy? Single cell suspended algae that causes pea soup? Carpet algae which is short and clings tightly to rocks? And where is it? In the waterfall? On the rocks? Sorry for all the questions. but they will all lead to a good solution!
If you can post some photos that would be most helpful.
