ive heard that you dont need to, but on this site it says you should..
anyways, im wondering about the steps to do so..i havent cleaned it before, i reccently built it.
i have foam pads, then bio balls, and then another foam pad, ,sandwiching the bioballs.
can the bio balls be taken out water for just a few seconds to be rinsed?, or will they die out of the water?
am i suppose to rinse with some pond water?, and should i be gentle with the pads and balls or can i just swish them through the water quickly..
thanks so much.
I have well water so I use the hose to squirt down my bags of bioballs, lava rock, and filter material. If you have city water, you should use the pond water to avoid harming the good bacteria with chlorine or chloramine. I use a kiddie pool to clean my filter stuff. You could bail some pond water into a kiddie pool. Then, swish the filter stuff in the water in the kiddie pool. Lots of gunk should come out (in a mature pond in the summer). Put the stuff back and dump the rotten water or bail it out to water some plants (plants love that black pond slop that I sometimes call pond gold). You can be pretty vigorous with cleaning the filter stuff which will remove some good bacteria but you want to remove a lot of the gunk in there. The good bacteria need surfaces on which to attach and grow which is hard to do with lots of rotting stuff in there. Somewhere in the forum is my argument as to why cleaning the filter material is more good than bad because it frees up places for good bacteria to grow. In the summer, I squirt my filter stuff once a month. In the winter, I do it every 5 weeks as long as the pond isn't frozen over that week (which delays it a week and so on).
Good bacteria are not that delicate (at least in established ponds). Remember, they are growing on ALL surfaces in the pond not just in the filter. For that reason, even if you killed the filter bacteria, in time it would reseed from the pond's liner, waterfall, rocks, etc. That said, you certainly don't want to kill a ton of good bacteria when cleaning the filter but some will die which can't be helped. We're talking millions dying out of billions. Good bacteria will die if they completely dry out for a long time (hours). That won't happen during the course of a cleaning.
When your pond is new, you should swish the filter material more gently as you won't have a lot of debris or good bacteria yet. In an established pond, you can be more vigorous. I really beat mine up! I throw the bags, slam them down, squirt them off, slam them on the other side, shake them, put them back, etc. Boy, I'm mean!