How to Build a Koi Pond - Design!

Design is critical....

Building a Koi pond

Bottom drains. Stand pipes. Settlement chambers... Mechanical filtration bio logical filtration... the list seems endless.

I know that when I started this incomplete journey that I was as confused as all hell when researching my pond on the Internet. As it happens, my pond was delayed by over a year because I started importing filtration equipment only to discover that there was this market wanting to buy it all from me. Hence Happy Koi.

But the point is to help YOU understand what goes into a GOOD Koi pond from a design and construction point of view.

We start with design, depth, size and shape.

In a Koi pond ideally you would like around 10 000l in capacity. This is because Koi get big and in South Africa we are starting, albeit slowly, to see bigger and bigger Koi in ponds.

Then the deeper the pond the better. Depth helps build body volume it is led to believe, but better body volume is built when Koi have something to swim against. That helps develop muscle and 'presence' in a fish. So try, if you can, to get pond returns in such a fashion that it achieves circulation, AND something for the Koi to swim against.

Shape is next up - an ideal pond as our builder puts it, is a half water melon...

The water goes where the red bits of the water melon are. Note that the side of the melon are sloped. Imagine trying to get water to circulate around the edges of the melon in a continuous slow moving vortex movement.

Looking a side on view of the same melon, the green arrow indicates the perfect place to locate a bottom drain.