Troubleshooting a Laguna pump

[ponder630]

Just a thought, how clean is your media in your filter?

When I started my new filter after one day I noticed my waterfall flow was reduced. I looked at my filter media and it was clogged full of debris. I had to continually clean them every day for the first few days since the pond was first opened this spring.

Just a thought that hit me after seeing your picture..

 

[Shdwdrgn]

@ponder - Its clean enough, but even if that were a problem, I have skippy-style filters, so the water can flow around the media if needed.

Just to fill you in, I have TWO 55-gallon filters set up, each one fed by a separate 2" pipe and pump. There is an obvious difference in the flow of water going in to each filter. Last night I pulled the pumps and used one to back-flow through the pipe, but nothing came out. I have a couple of access plugs along the length, but there was nothing obvious in either one. And yesterday I swapped the pumps between the two pipes, and still had the same flow going to this filter, so I feel that it is obviously some kind of restriction in the pipe, I just can't figure out where. I'll have to find something clean that I can push through the pipe and see if I can find the problem, although I would have through reversing the flow would have dislodged anything... So at this point I just really don't know what's going on.

 

[Shdwdrgn]

Well it seems to be doing 'better', but still not really pushing through the volume of water I am used to. And the algae is just giving me all kinds of problems. I took apart and cleaned out my pumps last weekend, and by the beginning of this weekend I noticed the water had greatly reduced again. Pulled the pumps out of the water, and both were solidly packed with algae again. My plants are finally starting to really grow, and the algae appears to be reducing in volume, but I'm worried that with it plugging up the pumps so frequently, it may be bad for the pumps. At least I haven't seen either pump ever completely blocked and unable to pass water through it, so they haven't run dry... I even tried adding bags of kitty litter this year, and it doesn't seem to have had any affect on the algae.

 

[HTH]

This is one of the reasons I like to have a gravity fed filter of some sort between the pump and the pond.

I used to have a submersible 1800GPH submersible pump in a formal pond. The input to the pump was a manifold with 4 or 5 Tetra-G pond sponges. The pump fed a filter that used a coco mat over quilt batting (aka filter floss) which trickled over a few gallons of bioballs.

The pond had a lot of lilies and some goldfish. The sponges, matts, and quilt batting had to be cleaned daily. The formal pond is the one in the foreground in this picture.