clarity Archives - Page 5 of 5

Clean, clear water is crucial for most watershapes, but when the vessel’s purpose is to house and nurture rescued and injured marine animals, says Pentair’s Mike Fowler, the need for top-quality water is even greater. Here, he describes how his company’s pool filters came to be used at an animal rehabilitation facility in Florida, where they now ensure that dolphins, sea turtles and more are nursed back to health and trained in crystalline water.

Helping Habitats

It was a rainy Wednesday morning in January when I first toured the Clearwater Marine Aquarium. I was on hand to inspect the recent installation of a pair of our horizontal sand filters for the facility's marine-mammal pool and see just how well the pool-filtration products were faring in this somewhat unusual (but not unheard of) application. Located on Island Estates in Clearwater, Fla., the aquarium was bustling with activity from the moment the doors opened at 9 a.m. On this day, a group of pre-school children had arrived to see the aquarium's newest dolphin, Presley, and his friend, Panama. The staff also explained to me that the aquarium, like other indoor attractions, is always busier when the rain falls. I joined right in with the crowd, fascinated by everything I was seeing. My guide, the aquarium's director of life support and marine facilities, Bill Meier, led me to the marine mammal pool - currently home to Presley and Panama but with the capacity to hold several more. This was the vessel on which my company, Pentair Pool Products of Sanford, N.C., had installed the sand filters. As I watched the children's faces as they in turn watched the dolphins, I began to realize that we were

Nature has it’s own set of rules, observes horticulturalist and zoologist Jeff Rugg of Pond Supplies of America. If you work in harmony with those rules, you stand a good chance of being successful in creating systems that support plant and animal life. Work against them, he says, and nature will soon show you the error of your ways. Here’s a look at what it takes to make the balancing act work, from pond sizing to basic equipment and materials.

Practicing Nature’s Balance

It all begins with the water. The first thing anyone approaching the world of ponds needs to understand is that life-supporting water is quite unlike the sterile water found in swimming pools or spas or many other watershapes. A second and related point is that clear water is not necessarily healthy water when it comes to the needs of the inhabitants of the pond. For a pond to be healthy, its water must meet the chemical requirements of plants and fish by having an abundance of some things (such as nutrients) and a near-total lack of other things (such as pollutants). Sanitized water may be beautifully clear, but the fact that sterile systems are designed to knock out nutrients and work chemically because they are "polluted" with chlorine and algaecides makes them completely unsuitable as life-supporting ecosystems. The goal with ponds is to work with nature in balancing the life-sustaining features of the water - and to set things up in such a way that maintaining that balance will be something your clients can do long after you've moved along to another project. To do so, you need to embrace the water-quality basics outlined in the last issue of

Beauty and tranquility are words on the lips of more and more consumers these days, and they’re discovering with greater and greater frequency that ponds are just what they’re after. Critical to meeting this rising demand, says zoologist and horticulturalist Jeff Rugg, is knowing what goes into creating healthy, clean water in the presence of plants and animals – and into setting these mini-ecosystems up for the long haul.

Nature’s Balance

It's a tale of two professions: Pool and spa people are taught to keep things dead; pond people are taught to keep things alive. Pool people sell chlorine; pond people sell de-chlorinator. Pool people sterilize; pond people fertilize. This contrast in approaches to basic water maintenance is perhaps the most significant difference between two trades that are coming into closer and closer contact with one another every day. At issue between the two groups is whether to work against nature in a sterile system, or work with it to create an ecosystem. Each discipline has a foundation in the science of water chemistry and both have a place in the world - but beyond that (and as the table below demonstrates), things really couldn't be much different. As more and more pool/spa professionals move into water gardening and more and more landscape designers and architects get into pools and spas, there's an increasing need for all of us to understand these water-treatment distinctions and the basics of each approach. I come from the pond side, so I'll cover things from that perspective in a pair of articles - a science-oriented overview this time before we

Designing a New Paradigm

There was a time not long ago when the mere thought of pool builders and landscape designers getting together on equal footing and having meaningful conversations about backyard design would have met with skepticism: There is not, it seems, much love lost between the trades. But times are changing, and if the dialogue begun around a table last August is any indication, there's a tremendous amount to be gained by keeping the communications channels wide open.

Easier by Analogy

Several years ago, I was asked to conduct a seminar on basic electricity for the members of a small homeowners' association. They were working their way alphabetically through the various trade disciplines with which a homeowner might come in contact. As I recall, they had covered attic fans, brickwork, cabinetry, carpeting, decks and doors at previous meetings. I learned that I was to be followed in coming months by fences, fireplaces and