ahhh ha. Yes I know Greg Very well......
Bickals DIY Koi out of Iowa.....

I seem to recall those little houses that used the heat off a light
bulb. Iowa does get some extreme weather too. I may see Greg in
Orlando this year, as I am hoping to get to the Orlando show......

I do not have any faith in Laguna anything. I tend to view their
stuff as entry level aimed at folks that just happen to be in a big
box or water garden store and see the "Complete Kit for watergarden"
setup on the shelf and hubby and wifey just can not resist the pretty
pictures and buy it. I am not saying its junk, but I never had any
good luck with it. Another infamous brand is CAL pump.....dunno if
they changed any, but they were pityfull in terms of reliability.

I tend to lean to Hozelock Titans or Danner Mag Drives (pondmasters)
myself for a submersible pump. I'm just glad I do not have to deal
with weather extremes like freezing weather......

I came across a super deal on pumps a few months back. We had some
super big rainfalls and the numerous creeks and river flooded lots of
areas out. The areas that got inundated were the high rent district of
town, and most all those high dollar houses have koi ponds.......well
at least ponds with plants anyhow....Well needless to say a lot of
external pump vaults got wet.The local pond maintenance company here
who also owns the only pond and fish and aquatic plants as well as
being a huge nursery supply, merely pulled the pumps and replaced
them with new pumps. I happened to be up at the nursery picking up 2
cypress trees and other plants and noticed a pile of pumps etc at the
dumpster. I inquired and they said have at it, so I loaded them all up
and drug them home. I viewed that pile of pumps as, it was highly
unlikely a pump and motor would be bad at the same time, so I was
bound to be able to put something together out of them all. I had a
total of 11 Sequence pumps.......IIRC. I pulled em all apart and all
had water in the motors. I cleaned and dried them all, replaced
bearings in most, which I happend to have in my scrounge, and I got
all l pumps back in operating condition. I ran and checked each pump,
and left them run pumping water up a 2" pipe to create head pressure
etc out of my pond for 72 hours and they all ran nice and quiet and no
leaks.......I sold a few and used the rest on my replumbing project on
my quarantine tanks by my one pond. I used to have one pump providing
water into the QT tanks now each ha its o wn pump so I can now isolate
each tank and still maintain filtering capability. My quarantine tanks
are concrete burial vaults I picked up a few years back that were
chipped or cracked......and were destined to be busted up and dumped
ina landfill...I got em for the hauling away.....and patched the
cracks up and drilled holes as needed and turned em into QT
tanks.......


One nice thing about a Danner is they can be run dry or submerged.



On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:39:53 GMT, ~ jan
wrote:

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:11:02 -0600, Tristan
wrote:

I stil need to check that 100 watt heater setup out. Its still hard
to belive its gonna raise up the water temp in extreme cold weather
and a large volume of water......

It only keeps a hole open in the middle of it, and from the sounds of the
person on TFA, either her's died or it doesn't do extreme weather. I have
heard that a Laguna 200 watt is notorious for dying (they look very much
the same). Since it has a nice little hole at the top, I put an airstone
down it, so I have double coverage. The koi ponds get 1000 watts though.

I still can not get over a 100 watt heater though! ;-)

Do you remember Greg Bickal? He used to build these little floating houses
and inside would be two 25 watt light bulb. http://bickal.home.mchsi.com/

And if you haven't visited his website lately, he's done some more really
cool stuff. Lots of pictures, and the koi breeding is very
interesting, plus check out his koi house (I want one)! ~ jan



-------
I forgot more about ponds and koi than I'll ever know!