Use Japanese Matting to Keep Your Koi Fish Pond Clean and Healthy

Note - this web page is intended for the serious koi fish keeper, rather than the casual garden water ponds enthusiast. However, the points made here are just as valid for small water ponds as well as large water ponds. If you have a small water pond, and you don't keep fish, you probably don't need an air pump system. But if you do keep fish, you'll need both a good pump and a biofilter to keep your fish safe and healthy.

A point to keep in mind is that not only do your koi and other fish need oxygen in the water to breath, but so does a biofilter. A biofilter is a living organism in itself, full of beneficial bacteria, and it will die if it is not fed oxygen on a continual basis. This is why you need to operate you pump at all times in order to keep your pond ecosystem alive and functioning.

Water ponds... before feeding your fish

If you measured the chemical balance of your pond water before feeding your fish, you would see that the ammonia levels and oxygen levels at the water inlet side of the biofilter would be be low and high respectively. And if your biofilter is working properly, at the water outlet side you would see the ammonia levels at zero, and the oxygen levels would be somewhat lower than at the inlet side.

This is normal, as the bacterial in your biofilter work to control water purity and remove harmful chemicals like ammonia from the water. In fact, the ammonia serves as food fro the biofilter, which converts this toxic chemical to useful by products like nitrite and nitrate. By keep the ammonia levels low, your fish live healthy lives. And the plants in your water pond also help in this process.

Water ponds ... after feeding your fish

Be aware that all fish food contains nitrogen of some kind, which passes through your fish and is expelled as ammonia in the water. This process happens very rapidly, and you would notice a sharp rise in ammonia levels in your pond water after feeding your fish....

For example, now at the inlet to your biofilter you would notice a high level of ammonia, with high oxygen levels as well. But again, you would see a much lower level of ammonia and oxygen at the outlet of your biofilter.

So how does this process occur? As the pond water passes through the bacteria in your biofilter, the ammonia is consumed, along with part of the oxygen content. However, a biofilter is not able to consume all of the ammonia in the water in a single pass, so the water needs to be re-circulated through the filter several times to achieve maximum results.

This can be accomplished by replacing the oxygen removed by the biofilter (which it needs to survive) and then running the water through the filter again. Some ways of replacing the oxygen are by using a waterfall, or a sprinkler or foam fountain effect, and by using air pumps to inject oxygen into your system.

This is the reason why a water ponds pump must run 24/7 in your fish pond.

See the air pump article for more on how to use them in water pond systems. Based on the above discussion, it is apparent that your biofilter bacteria need lots of oxygen and that oxygen is removed in the biofilter continuously in the biofilter process itself. The question then becomes: where is the best place in a water pond system to inject air or oxygen?

The answer is as close as possible to where the bacteria are migrating in your pond system. This is the reason that vortex filters and Japanese matting work so well together in any serious koi pond system. And to be most effective, large amount of air need to be pumped around the Japanese matting matrix.

The reason that Japanese matting works so well in this application is the fact that this medium lends itself to efficient contact between bacteria, food source and oxygen.

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