FEATURED VIDEO: Get your Pond Ready For Winter - SPRINGBANK KOI

Hello my name is Clayton Morris and I run the Springbank Koi and Aquatics YouTube channel. It's basically about me being a big old koi geek, a little bit awkward on camera and the fact that building this shop is slowly but surely trying to kill me. So if that's something you're into hop over to the... who says hop over? Head on over to my channel and subscribe and thanks Richard for sharing my video on your YouTube channel. It's been that mild recently, I don't think there's any reason to do anything different with the pond this year. Although, I might check the weather. Relatively mild air. So exceptionally mild here. The air is still mild. It's really mild. Well, that settles that. It'll be fine. I mean, the weather reporters never get it wrong, do they? Good afternoon, Chew. Earlier on today, apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, if you're watching, don't worry. There isn't. Worst gales in three centuries sweep through Britain. They came without warning in the early hours of the morning. Winds that hit 110 miles an hour, 110 miles an hour, 110 miles an hour. I'll just check, yep, no more TV for me today. So the truth is, the weather's that unpredictable over here, we just don't know. So the best thing to do is always just prepare for the worst. So it's mild now, but I bet you in four weeks that no one will be leaving the house without We're going to have about 15 pairs of clothes on. Apart from that really weird one suspicious postman. So hopefully these few things that I'm going to go through will make the transition from winter to spring a bit easier and obviously the pond's in the best shape you can be when you get to spring. So number one is routine maintenance. Make sure you keep up with it. So make sure you keep on cleaning your filters, changing all the water. Although everything slows down in the pond now, the fish are still producing waste so you need to keep doing everything that you have been doing. Also, if you're not doing it, make sure you purge your drains, it's something that's really easy to do, we do it every day in the shop, and it's surprising that if we miss one day, you know, because I'm not there or something like that, a pound of muck actually comes through, so make sure you keep on purging your drains, and I'd advise you to do it every day, but, you know, if you can't, I understand that these things happen, but it is really easy, I mean, it's so easy I can do it with one hand. Why won't you f***ing f***ing, easy as that. Number two is to check all your pipework, if you've got any pipework that looks brittle or anything like that, now's the time to change it. If you've got any pipework that's exposed and it's not pressure piped, you know, get it lagged or get it covered because at this time of year, it's always these things that go pop basically and you end up with obviously the pond emptying or leaking, it's just a good time to make sure that all your pipework has that pipework is scratch. Now, if you're a pump fed pond, you'll see pictures of this on every Facebook post. Every Facebook page, every forum is someone's pipework split, something's happened, and basically the pond's completely empty out. At the worst time of year, really, for it to happen. Lucky for you, I've already done a video on this, and it's fitting a float switch. So if you haven't done that, I'll link the description thing above me now, by magic. Go and have a look at that video. Get a float switch fitted, it'll save you a whole heap of trouble. So, number three. This is probably going to be the most controversial one that I say. Get a heater on your pond. I'm not saying you have to heat to 20 degrees all the way through winter, but get a heater on there. Set it between somewhere, you know, between 6 and 10 degrees. A carp will go hypothermic under 4 degrees. In a lake, in a big natural lake, the water temperature very rarely goes under 4 degrees. Now that's because of water density. I'm not gonna go into that now, I might save that for another video. It's a bit heavy to talk about here. Whoa, this is heavy. But they're never going to get exposed to the temperatures that could potentially happen in a pond because the water's getting mixed all the time. By putting a heater on it, you're going to stop all the complications that come with these really low temperatures. I'd say aim for somewhere about 8 degrees, listen there's a heater out there at all sorts of budgets now, there's everything from the cobble heaters that I run in the shop, right up to inverter heat pumps that you use on swimming pools. Now I'm not going to lie, it's going to cost you money to run it, but I'm sure the cost of running it is probably less than replacing all the stock because of that. I know people are going to watch this video and say, well, I've kept my pond, I've never heated it, it's frozen over, and I've never had any issues. Well, there's a difference, and I don't want to sound condescending here, but there's a difference between thrive and survive, and you are walking on a tightrope as well when you allow your pond to get down to that critical temperature. So my advice is, after all the money that you spend on fish and other equipment, put a heater on it, set it between somewhere six and ten. And make sure that your fish are really being exposed. So number four, actually number four this time, is switch over to wheat germ, a winter version of the food that you're already feeding. Wheat germ isn't some kind of plant-based monster. I'm starting It's just a wheat-based food. It's thought to be more digestible than obviously the heavy, oily, and fatty fish meals that we usually feed during the summer months. Now there's some... to There's some thoughts of white fish meals and raw extruded pellets and things like that but speak I think the general consensus for this video what we'll say is switch over to something wheat germ now. based or something that is the winter version of the food and that'll benefit your fish as well. And number five any equipment that you leave outside that's got potentially has water in it for instance the chlorinators you know the three the three stage chlorinators say for instance you do a 10% water change a week and then you fill it back up With your three-stage dechlorinator, because there's water in that, if you leave that outside in freezing temperatures, it'll ice over, the ice will expand, and you'll end up with a broken dechlorinator. Some of you may have waterfalls or systems like that where you take it off during the winter. Just make sure there's no water sat in any of the pipes, dechlorinators, and things like that, because unfortunately, when it freezes, it's your equipment. So, yeah, not a great thing to wake up to is a broken dechlorinator. So yeah, just make sure you go around and check that. If you can't take the water out of it, just bring it inside. So that's it for this video. Hopefully it gives you a few tips to make the transition from winter to spring a bit easier. If you liked it, give us a like. Make sure you subscribe and I'll see you on the next one.