A Koi Pond is not normally a small project and you need to manage it properly for it to be successful...

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Happy Koi's take on building a Koi pond

Are you considering a Koi pond?

On this website

you will hopefully find a lot of information, all of it free, about the fascinating hobby that is Koi keeping.

If you are starting out on Koi for the first time we ask that you consider all aspects of the hobby most seriously and carefully. Keeping Koi is not something that just happens in the background of your life.

Keeping Koi requires a commitment on your behalf of time and money. Koi ponds require constant maintenance and although you can outsource some of this, the ultimate responsibility for your Koi pond rests with you. Unless you are Uber super mega rich and can afford to employ a Koi pond maintenance person, in which case you will not be reading this right now anyway.

The heart and soul of your Koi keeping experience is your Koi pond. You can only build it once, and you will have to live with it for all time. Koi live for up to thirty years quite comfortably and they can reach a metre in length (their size is not determined by the pond size!). Your Koi pond needs to be able to accommodate all of this.

Koi are also living creatures with everything that goes with it. They are stunningly peaceful and beautiful living jewels that can add a measure of tranquility to your life that little else can match, but it doesn't happen by accident. Living creatures get sick from time to time, and they also occasionally suffer from the inevitable lack of life that we are all destined to one day suffer from.

But it is a hobby that has no equal. It will teach you patience, resolve and resilience. It will delight, enthral and reward you like no other hobby can. You will never will never stop learning about your Koi and your Koi pond and you can be challenged to any level of the hobby that you are comfortable with from keeping your Koi in the best quality water as a starting point to identifying, growing, showing and winning with your own Koi at the ultimate challenge - a Koi show.

We start on a word of caution

We have been known to speak directly. We're sorry about that but that's the way we work and always have done.

The bad news is that building a Koi pond is not something you can do yourself without help.

Worse, calling in an alleged professional Koi pond builder to do the job for you, is also no comfort. We have seen more disasters built by 'professionals' than we have seen built by amateur enthusiasts.

Still further, technology has moved on. The days of pressurised filtration powered by energy guzzling pumps are over. The 'professional' way of installing a simple sand filter with 'special Koi sand' in it may sound great on paper and in price, but the reality of it is that you are the one who really gets to pay on an ongoing basis in the future.

Happy Koi has been involved in hundreds of Koi ponds ranging from a few thousand litres to ponds of a few hundred thousand litres. We have seen sights and heard sounds on Koi ponds that would make an interesting book. well, interesting for the first 5 minutes after which the key point will have been made:

Build your Koi pond once! It is the single most important part of your hobby.

Build it once, do it properly and it will be a thing of continual delight and amazement to you as opposed to becoming a massive weight on your shoulders.

Your other favourite saying which goes hand in hand with this is should be:

There are NO shortcuts when it comes to building your Koi pond.

Surprisingly the Koi industry is in fact an extremely competitive one.

So, if there were shortcuts, believe us when we say that we'd be using them! We would use them on our own systems, we'd install them and our pricing would be more competitive and we'd have more business and we'd make more money.

But we don't use shortcuts because they don't work for you. And you are the one our business depends on. If shortcuts don't work for you, and we recommend or install them on your pond what does that say about our future relationship? It says we won't have one - that's what it says! And that's a rubbish way to build a business in our humble opinion.

So we focus on YOU and your Koi pond experience.

That said the other slightly bad news is that a Koi pond might cost you a bit more than you may have anticipated. We started off with our first Koi pond on a shoe string budget and borrowed second hand pipe work and bits of left over glue and second hand bricks. It didn't work then and it won't work now!

We've rebuilt that pond. It cost us more than than double what it would have cost to do it properly in the first place because we literally had to pay to have it demolished and then pay to have everything on it carted away to the dump. It was a painful learning experience and of course it was painful from the point of view of realising we were idiots. That thankfully was 'more years than we care to think about' ago.

You will find our take on Koi ponds to be unique, at least in South Africa. We don't like sand filters. We don't like pressurised systems. We don't like power guzzling badly designed and badly installed filtration systems. In short, we don't like Koi ponds that don't work!

You can obtain a lot of free advice from this website. When it comes to application of if for your Koi pond we charge our time. This is because this is we have chosen to make our obsession with Koi livelihood.

If you follow our 26 steps on your Koi pond you cannot go wrong.

Still need some help? Mail us here!

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