If you have ducks water seems necessary, part 1

We now have eight ducks in three age groups. They get along very well, the youngest are not quite 3 weeks old. I was given a pond that holds some where between 200 and 300 gallons. It has two levels, the deepest level is below ground level.

Ducks are messy! They get a mouth full of food or mud and take it to the water. I have also observed that it is almost automatic for them to poop in the water when they first get in. The water quickly becomes quite foul. It is not practical to dump this much water so I am taking lessons learned from aquaponics and applying them to the duck pond.

I am recirculating the water and filtering it by two different methods. The first is a gross settling pond and the second is a rock / floss filter.

I have been through several configurations but the current one seems to be some what stable. In this video you see the ducks swimming in the pond and you see the water being drained into a re-purposed bathtub. This is the gross settling filter, it is actually preforming quite well. The tub is set on an angle so that the drain is 8 (or more) inches higher than the other end. This makes a pool of water that swirls around and dumps much of the heavy soil before it reaches the drain. This is a method adapted from the sewage treatment plant. Water leaving the tub via the drain has significantly less soil than that entering the tub. The tub also serves as a growing space for water hyacinth (a very quick growing aquatic weed) that can purify the water and become fodder or fertilizer. Less than three weeks ago I started with three plants and now have more than 10 plants. They also have pretty flower spikes and simply float on the water surface.

In the second part I will show the sump which contains the pump to circulate the water and the fine (polishing) filter.

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  Pets & Animals