I get letters about pond vacs. There are some that work great, but they are not cheap, nor are they perfect. Most of the letters I receive are asking about a cheap pond vac.
There are vacuum cleaners sold at swimming pool places. They look like large swimming pool blue dinner plates with a large hole in the center and attach to a garden hose. The force from the water going through the garden hose pushes the debris into a net that you have attached to the top of the 'dinner plate'. They will rarely do any good because they are best at removing leaves, etc., not clumped up dead algae. I have tried replacing the commercial net that you get when you by one of these, with an old panty hose leg and it works better, but still not great.
6 comments:
I have purchased and used the PondoVac 3 Pond Vacuum and it will not vacuum leaves in a pond that has more than a couple of leaves. To put bluntly it sucks and I don't mean it works either!
The pondoVac 3 will not work well if the pond is deep or you have to put it far above the water level thus making the thing have to suck a long ways. If they have to pick up leaves or debris from a long distance, you are right, they suck.
I made my own vacuum using a utility (or lawn) pump, a whole house water filter and some The pump I used was a 1hp Utilitech lawn pump, model #0024840. I connected that to an Ametek HD-10 Whole House Water Filter, and connected the filter to some 1-1/4" tubing and pvc pipe. The whole thing cost around $250.
What a great idea. So far, no company has made a decent pond vac. They are getting better, but still do not do a good job. Yours sounds like it works well. Congrats.
It does work well. I use a small circular brush attachment from an Oreck hand vacuum we have. That does a nice job of stirring up the sediment so the pump can suck it up. There's the added benefit of not adding water from a hose, or having to dump it outside the pond.
Any chance of you posting a photo and explanation of how you built it on my website at:
http://www.pondlady.com
Thanks.
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