To Completely Empty and Clean or Not....That is the Question

[GinoLicious]

I suggest not cleaning it fully. I was toying around with the idea of a full drain as well before I noticed I still had fish in it from the winter. I bring my fish inside for the winter. But I didn't grab all of them.

Run your filter and check it every other day and make sure you clean the filter. I have two in my filter box connected to the pump and the get gross quickly. I suggest scooping the junk out and running the filter.

 

[Lisak1]

My pond "cleaning" consists of running the net across the pond floor a few times to scoop the big stuff and in the process I swirl around a lot with my net to get the smaller stuff back up into the water column so it gets moved out of the pond. I do that a couple of times every spring and voila! Clean pond! Occasionally I'll put the hose underwater and use the force of the water to stir things up. Basically I like my pond to clean itself as much as possible!

 

[Faebinder]

Be careful vacuuming your fish. Happened to me twice in the past. I'm not even counting the number of times I vacuumed a darter or a fry. Too small of a nozzle won't suck much.

Now I net my pond so never have to vacuum and I use activated carbon every now and then for the left over debris that came through the bog.