FLOW METER
Please forgive the commercial post - but these are not usually available at your local Wal-Mart……
The FLOW METER looks like an upside down test tube attached on top of a horizontal pipe. As the water rushes past it thru the pipe, it has a little thingee that rises up the tube to indicate how much water in GPM is running thru the pipe.
Coastal usually stocks the 1-1/2″(max 80gpm), 2″(max 140gpm), and 3″ (max 350gpm) models.
Installation is very easy - you drill a specific size hole on the top of a horizontal pipe and clamp the flow meter on to the pipe - very easy.
They are not on our website (yet) so you would find them at 888-pond-h20.
DO NOT CONFUSE THESE WITH THE MELNOR METER. It is the one I usually talk about that measures the total amount of water and TURNS THE WATER OFF when it gets to the magic quantity that you set it for. Anyone who is still filling their pond with a garden hose without one of these on the hose is playing russian roulette with the lives of their pets. And, yes, we stock them too.
And the other posts are absolutely correct - pressure is usually a very bad way to watch a filter. First, most gauges are for too high a pressure range, so that detecting a small variation cannot be done. Secondly, you usually shouldn’t wait for the filter to clog up. The filter is catching and holding organic debris (poop, etc.) The longer it stays in the filter with water running over it the more it will dissolve and go back into solution = BAD!! So you should really be flushing out filters often enough to keep that from happening. My recommendation would be every two or three days at the longest. The object is not only to clean up the water visually, but to remove the organic wastes before they can dissolve and go back into solution to be food for the algae and degrade the water quality for the fish.
If you have a pressure gauge that is say… 60PSI maximum, and you are normally registering 0-4PSI+/-, then switching out the gauge for one that has a scale of 0 to 6 or 10 PSI would give you much better information about the condition of your filter. And gauges are (can be) inexpensive.
:-)
Bill
Category: Ponds-Koi
