How To Keep Your Backyard Pond Clean and Safe In Winter

As the winter starts with its full glory, you need to take care of your house inside out to maintain all the portions and keep things properly functional in chilled weather conditions. Out-door cleaning and maintaining is much more difficult and tricky than in-doors. Especially if you possess a pond in your backyard, it can be problematic to sustain the quality of water and cleanliness during the winters specially keeping it unfrozen is a real challenge. You can take utmost precautions to retain the water clean as much as possible and avoid the possible damage due to freezing pond water and other objects related to it. You can follow some simple steps to maintain the sanitation of water as well as keep the equipment functional and animals alive.

Backyard-Pond

1.     Clean the debris

First step to keep up the pond in winter season is to clean all the dead plants and rubbles from the pond with help of net careful. Avoid damaging floating and essential water plants as well as fishes. Dead plants and algae can cause harmful gases underneath water that could be dangerous for water life.

2.     Vacuum the bottom

After taking out the sizeable debris from the pond, take a vacuum cleaner and wipe of all the minor fragments and remains of plants as well as other items that may fell in the basis of pond.

 3.     Sanitize Filter

Pond water filter should be handled with care as it can cause you high expense it got damaged. Take it out, disengaged parts and clean it thoroughly. It will be beneficial to install the filter near the surface of the pond, as the bubbles coming up to the top from filter will keep the pond unfrozen during winters.

4.     Transfer aquatic plants

Water flora and fauna is quite costly and should be cared properly to keep them alive in harsh climate. There are two ways to let them live in minus temperatures. One is to move them deeper in the water as deeper water contains warmth. Other is to pick out the plants from water and store them skillfully at in-doors.

5.     Cover up

The best option to keep the pond and its creatures safe from freezing is to cover the entire pond with a sheet or if pond is small than you can use some container lid. Other benefit of covering the pond with hard or fabric sheet is that falling leaves will not spoil the whole pool. You can easily remove the sheet and get a ready pool for spring to make some prints to canvas UK of refreshing pond reflections and enjoy them as wall decorations.

6.     Get appropriate pond fish

If you wish to keep fishes and other water creatures in the pond, be careful about what type you are choosing for open-air pool in cold atmosphere. Get those fishes, which can easily survive in the extreme cold and can hibernate while frosting season.

7.     Feed less to fishes

During the chilled weather, throw less food in the pond for fishes. And stop feeding completely when freezing temperature starts. In this way fishes will make reduced amount of waste, they will be semi hibernated and can find enough nutrition in the pond to survive the frozen surroundings.

8.     De-icer products

De-icer products are coming widely famous due to heavy snow fall and solid ice freezing over ponds and pools. These products are much more helpful and effective rather than breaking the ice with hands or using inappropriate methods to melt the frozen ice. Store a sizeable amount of de-icer to use regularly on the frozen pond by making a hole in it that will the pond oxygenated and toxic gas will evaporate through the cavity.

9.     Heater needed

Due to sharp and extreme chilling weather, spices in your backyard pond will definitely need a warming water heater according to their physical need. It may cause you some high expense but is worthy to bear the cost for the special creatures and fishes you have in the pond with much more care and love, you would definitely not afford to lose them and let them dye in freezing weather.

10.  Keep water from freezing

Some simple tips can be used to make the water moving and revolving around, to keep it unfrozen. Put few soft balls or kids’ bath toys in the pool that will move with wind to keep the water stirring.

11.  Be careful to break ice

In case you face the problem of solid ice on the entire pond, be careful to break the ice as it can damaged fishes, can injure their gills or even can kill them. Always try to use de-icer and if it’s not available take a pan of hot boiling water and place it over the ice to let it thaw gradually.

12.  Handle spices with care

While handling fishes and other creature such as frogs, try to make them comfortable according to their lifestyle. Such as let the frogs remain outside of the pond as winter season starts because they can hibernate in mud and survive best their during the whole season. Regarding to fishes, you need to take care of difference of temperature between water while transferring from one pool to other or introducing to the new pond. Use Aqua-safe to remove chlorine, ammonia and chloramine before putting fishes in the pond for their safety.