Water Saving with Pondovac 3

We live in Toowoomba Qld and are experiencing a long drought and have severe water restrictions which include not being able to use a hose at all and can only top up a pond with buckets of water. So instead of letting the sludge water from the outlet pipe run onto the grass we are putting it back into the pond. We tried the bag that came with the Pondovac to catch the sludge and put the water back into the pond but the bag caught the big stuff and let the fine dirt through. As you can see in the photo we put the Pondovac up on the seat of the garden furniture and ran the outlet pipe down to a big plastic container from which we pumped the dirty water, using a 12 volt bilge pump, back into an old commercial wet vacuum cleaner with a liner that lets only the water through and collects all the dirt and puts the clean water back into the pond. It makes the process rather slow as we have to clean the sludge from the liner at regular intervals but we waste very little water. It is great to see the bottom of the pond again and our fish find it all entertaining.

Glad you found the way we are using our Pondovac 3 interesting. Today's photos show how for the first time in many years we can see the cement bottom of our pond. When the Pondovac was up on the garden seat we could clean the sides and edges of the pond but the bottom was too deep for the Pondovac to suck properly. So we put it on the ground and put the outlet hose into a 6 metre drain pipe, which we already had, left over from a plumbing job years ago, and then into the plastic container with the bilge pump etc. We are lucky that our pond is at the higher end of our garden so we could let the water flow down into the container.