You do need to know the volume of water in your garden fish pond
The volume of water in your garden fish pond plays an important role in deciding upon correct size of pond pump, pond filter and pond ultra violet light
Know your ponds volume ... ie the volume of water it holds including the waterfall
Ideally a ponds volume should be measured accurately at the time of filling the first time. If not then the slide rule or something more modern must come out. Many countries allow the house owner to read the water meter. This is the ideal way to measure your ponds volume. Just dont let the kids use the bathroom while you are doing it.
When you fill your pond for the first time record how much water your pond holds - you will need this information to specify a number of products and also for future reference. Store the information safely unless you can recalculate the volume yourself. You are looking not for absolute accuracy but a good close approximation to the final system volume.
A simple way to work out the approximate volume is to set the flow rate from the hosepipe and take the time it takes to fill a known volume container such as a 10 litre drum. Then takes the time to fill your pond. If you used a 10 litre container the calculation would then be as follows:
Time to fill 10 litre container say 20 seconds
Time to fill pond say 30 minutes
Then volume of pond = 10 x 30 x 60 divided by 20 = 900 litres
If your pond is square or rectangular and is the same depth throughout it is simple. All that is required is to multiply the length by the width by the depth. If you use metres then you multiply the result by 1,000 and the answer you get will be in litres.
Please note I will use litres throughout this book but I have also included conversion factors to allow litres to be expressed as imperial gallons or US gallons for example.
For a pond of 3 metres in length and 2 metres in width and 0.5 metres deep the volume of water it can hold is 3,000 litres of water. This is the formula to use here:
3.0 x 2.0 x 0.5 = 3.0 cubic metres = 3.0 x 1,000 = 3,000 litres
Using another example in feet and gallons
For a pond of 10 feet in length and 6 feet in width and 3 feet deep the volume of water it can hold is 180 cu feet of water. In US gallons 1 cu foot is 7.5 US gallons and in Imperial (UK) gallons 1 cu foot is 6.2 gallons. This pond would thus hold around 1,100 Imperial gallons or 1,350 US gallons . These are approximate numbers.
More complex examples are handled a bit later
EPDM rubber is probably the best
This web page is an extract from Tony Roocroft's "The Complete Pond Solver" ... you can read more about it at http://www.really-useful-books.com ... when you buy the book you get 12 Excel pond calculators free as well as "Water Lilies and Pond Aquatics" ebook also free.
