rtk wrote:

The smaller wattage is going in the bigger pond
because there's a considerable hole made by the falls. Because the
pumps are in the newly installed skimmers and I assume drawing water
mostly from the surface rather than disturb the depths, I leave them on
and keep holes in the ice from the falls, the de-icers being back-ups.

Be really careful about this. What can happen when you leave a waterfall
running in freezing temperatures is that you can get an ice dam that
diverts water outside the pond. That would be bad :-(

Miraculously, here in central Pa. I've never lost a fish to the cold.

Not that miraculous. I never lost a fish to cold in Ontario, either. As
long as your ponds are big enough not to freeze solid, and not overcrowded,
cold's the least of your problems. Predators are the big problem.

Aquariums are a different story. An occasional
fish *passes on* as they say these days.

Smaller volumes, bigger problems. One of my filters on a 200g aquarium
(with backup filtration, too) gave up days after I serviced it and left
town. My wife didn't bother to mention it until 24 hours after the fact.
Needless to say, practically everything "passed on".

Remember the baaaad old days when fish, people, and dogs died?

Yeah, I really don't understand the urge to euphemize. It hurt me just as
much last year when my dog was "put to sleep" as if she had died.

Here's an oddity, new to me. My brown goldfish are turning colors
seemingly randomly: big white spot here, blue blotch there, pink on the
other side.

That's the way it goes. I could sit beside the pond for hours looking for
the larger offspring to see if I could recognize changes in them.
Sometimes you can see that what you're looking at is the one you saw
yesterday with a new splotch of color, sometimes it just looks like a new
fish. When the pond's big enough, sometimes it _is_ a new fish :-)
--
derek