Your Koi Pond – 5 Great Design Ideas
Koi Pond Design
What a great idea. A pond in the backyard with fauna and viewing areas built in. It’s a great way to turn your land into a rewarding peaceful place to get some personal time and think. Just like any task, it comes down to materials, land, future goals and ability to do maintenance on your property.
Great Design Ideas Require Great Work
At the end of the day you are either going to be able to handle some, all or none of the work for yourself. You make decisions of design based on a few things: your desires, your budget, your physical constraints. You must be willing to pay for things you really cannot do and NOT GET STUCK.
View our Koi Pond Kits and Product Information
Check out these great ideas for designing and building your koi pond (doesn’t have to be koi specifically, but it’s a good example)
Koi Pond Basic – Specifications
A koi pond must be properly designed in order to allow whatever species you have living in your pond to thrive. In this case Koi Fish are the topic. Here are some basic guidelines for creating the necessary environment.
- 3+ feet deep
- 25 sq. ft. of pond per koi
- No less than 1,000 gallons of water
Koi fish need shade. If you’re pond is in the direct sunlight you need to grow some kind of water plants that provide reasonable shade throughout 15%-30% of the pond surface area. Regardless, you need some sort of plant life to provide food and a healthy ecosystem for your pond.
Good filtration is a necessity to handle organic waste produced by the system that cannot be consumed by the environment. Spray Koi Pond Coatings instead of rolls of liner are very beneficial because you can install a bottom drain easily in this scenario.
Aeration is necessary to provide appropriate oxygen levels to the pond for your koi and other animals in the system. If you live in a hot climate or have large fish, proper aeration is crucial and can be accomplished with jets, waterfalls, and shallow streams.
Water quality is the last component that cannot be overlooked in the design phase of your koi pond. Optimal ph and water temperature are the two main factors determining water quality. A temp between 39 F and 68 F is ideal along with a ph balance between 7.0 and 7.8
Koi Pond Design – Visualizing
This is where your yard becomes a canvas. Many people may decide to bring in a landscape architect to help perfect the physical presentation of the koi pond and the surrounding plants and ground. With a spray coating for a koi pond the ideas are limitless. You don’t need to line the pond with heavy rocks or debris to try and hold down a plastic liner or protect the edge of the liner. You are also able to design absolutely any shape you want unlike traditional ponds where you are limited to round, oblong, or kidney shaped. This is a big plus, especially in small areas where you may want small veins throughout the area or have bottom structure that makes for an odd shaped floor.
If you do not have the dimensional thinking and understanding of plants that co-exist well, than a consultant might be right for you.
If you do have the ability, you might want to take a look at some of these resources for layout ideas:
Backyard Design | Koi Pond Shapes
Do NOT USE SMALL ROCKS in your Pond
This is a big no no. The maintenance is a nightmare. If you decide to do this, you will have to clean out the pond rock every year and clean thoroughly. If you don’t, small pockets of hydrogen will form under and between the rocks. If one of this pockets bursts, you will have a koi grave instead of a koi pond.
Move your water!
Spray Coat Your Koi Pond
Spray polyurea and polyurea hybrids are becoming very available and with significant advantages over concrete and traditional pond liners.
- Concrete is very expensive in regards to labor and time to complete.
- Traditional liners are cheaper, but they come at a price. These systems typically only last a few years which ends up costing you double the time and effort to just do a spray koi pond kit. In fact the original installation is easier because you do not have to mess around with bulky liners and seams. Instead you simply spray the area to the proper build, let it cure and … well, that’s it. This is also a LOT easier than trying to use concrete. There is no way you are going to do concrete DIY unless you are a mason by trade.
My existing pond was lined with an EPDM liner in it. I wanted to make the Koi pond larger and have Polyurea sprayed in it for longevity. The EPDM liner was left under the large rock at the beginning of the waterfall area. We married the EPDM liner to the new Polyurea liner. Also sprayed in steps just in case anybody fell in and needed to get out. The Koi pond works great and it is safe. Thanks to Spray Lining & Coatings for their product.
There are many ways to make your Koi Pond sealed that will work great with the fish. Polyurea liners are very popular as water garden or garden pond liners. While they are more expensive than plastic pond liners, they tend to be more flexible and conform to the contours of small water features quite easily. They are not as strong as some of the flexible plastics, but rubber pond liners are easier to handle in tight spaces. This lends to rubber pond liners popularity in small garden ponds.
My children visited a relative who had a really cool Koi pond in their back yard. All landscaped with rocks and plants. As a surprise, I decided to add a Koi pond to our backyard – a small pond. So, I decided to look into a bed liner type liner for the pond. I contacted spray-Lining & Coating and spoke to a service technician who gladly gave me all the information. I was informed that they would need to know the size of the pond – circumference, depth and width…after providing the information, our service tech was very helpful and delivered exactly what we needed…we made the bottom a blue color, which I didn’t even know you could do was add color. The kids love the pond and with the exception of the kids wanting more fish…it is absolutely a delight to sit around the pond and visit with friends and relatives. Thank you Randy for all your help and assistance.
Our Koi pond is very old and needed repair. So, I contacted a spray lining distributor and questioned about draining my pool and starting over. Since I was in the same area, Matt came to my house, measured for what we discussed and within 3 weeks my pond was beautiful. He even had a truck load of sand delivered and since the pond was gradual entrance, we can now walk with the fish. Thank you Matt!!!
As a lover of Koi, I wanted my pond to be fresh and new for the holiday season. I visited many sites on-line and finally joined a pond liner forum to educate myself. I finally called a distributor and discussed my needs. Within a very few days, a product was delivered to me and we restored our pond. We had some difficulty with some weird instructions, so contacted the company and because of the professionalism and expertise of the tech we spoke with, our pond is fresh and new. Thank you Spray-Lining and Coatings!!!!