OK, I used the pondovac 4 this afternoon....
It's ok, from what I noticed.... but I can catagorically say, from my experiance with this, don't even consider getting a small less powerful model.
IMO even the PV4 on 1800w struggled sometimes.
I tried my top wildlife pond first, it does suck up frogs, as it sucked up definately one. Water does stop coming out the end sometimes, I guess sludge gets in the way, or the odd frog... I only saw one in the machine, I tried to get it out, but he went down the outpipe, presume he made his way out, well, the water would have pushed him out... not to happy on the wildlife being sucked up, but not much can do...
The pond went very murky (it was very sludgy at bottom), so will see what it looks like in the next day or 2.
I then tried to hoover up some leaves on the bottom of my "koi" pond, tried being the operative word... I reduced the length of the solid plastic pipes to help (I had put extra on as it is a deeper pond) but the leaves blocked the end. The pond went murky and as that pond wasn't too bad, I thought best to quit whilst ahead.
Thank goodness getting a proper pond with BD.
The REAL test will be tomorrow when I tackle mums pond, that is sludgy. Fill you in on that, I expect to take a few days slowly on that... Mum only has a small pond with a few mixed fish in.
Just used it a 2nd time, and 2nd time is always best
Apart from marriage, still on 1st
I definately sucked up another frog, but it was fine
It sucked up gravel and sludge. I used the big nozzel thing, and the see thru tube, so could see the brown sludge being drawn in and then a white bit, plain water.
It did get blocked twice, took me a little while to figure it out, but the inlet has a rubber flappy thing, a small stone / pebble got in it, that stopped it dead. I guess the other times it "slowed/stopped" was thick sludge or a frog (but I only saw 1 of those) and that I guess gets sucked through. A couple of times, I just took the nozzel out, to let the machine cough up the stuck stuff, then business as usual.
So for my pond small went ok. As it runs to my "koi" pond that is now totally murky, so can't even see the few leaves on bottom to even attempt that again...
Next stop, tomorrow, mums
