Pond skimmers are a fundamental part of any pond construction, yet are so often overlooked by the pond builder or designer.

Pond skimmers are designed to remove floating debris, foam bubbles and dust from your pond's water surface by suction, giving the water a polished look. These easy to install and relatively economical devices can save hours in cleaning and maintenance and really can improve the overall water quality of your pond.

A skimmer can make all the difference between enjoying a pond and beginning to resent it. A properly functioning skimmer will collect leaves and anything else that lands on the surface of your pond and collect it into a basket, where it can be easily disposed of. Without a pond skimmer you are sentenced to a life of continually having to clean and remove debris from the pond's surface. In addition, pond skimmers will remove all this debris before it has a chance to sink and degrade, help to improve the general water quality and aid in the prevention of extra strain being placed on our filtration systems.

Even if you were considering building a pond indoors you should still install a skimmer because in addition to leaves, they skim off the "dissolved organic compounds" (DOC). Dissolved organic compounds will form in any pond, and if not removed will cause an unsightly film and bubbles on the water's surface. Considering the little amount they cost, the benefits are tremendous. The surface skimmer is an important piece of equipment for any pond, but more essentially for the koi pond. It is more often forgotten about at the time of constructing the pond: most koi keepers wish they had put one in at the time of construction. If you are going to build a new koi pond then please don't forget to fit one of these surface skimmers. On larger ponds two or more may be needed, and these are best built into the walls of the pond at the time of construction.

As mentioned above the purpose of the surface skimmer is to skim, or pull off, floating debris and even dust from the surface of your pond. The pond skimmer works best when gravity falling into a sieve unit, such as the Ultrasieve III, where the leaves and debris can be removed very easily. After the sieve we recommend that the system uses it's own separate pump and pumps into it's own filtration system, such as an Econobead or Superbead: you could even pump to a shower unit if so desired. Alternatively you could replace the Ultrasieve with an Eazy Pod.

In simple terms, when the surface skimmer is built into the wall the pipe carrying the waste and of course the surface water, is drawn through the filtration system using a suitably sized pump, the size of this pump will depend on what type of filter and the size of pond you have. The water can then be returned direct to the pond, waterfall, or indeed any other pond feature. A more preferred option is to return the water through some form of filtration system, as  there would be very little point in using a skimmer to skim off the floating debris, finer particles and dust to simply pump it back into the pond.

We at Dankoi have many different skimmers on offer, to suit every design of pond. For those of you who didn't install one of these at the time of construction we offer the very best in retro-fit pond skimmers. We have the Certikin skimmers (our most popular pond skimmer) and Olympic skimmers which have a 1.5 inch outlet and are ideal to just skim the water and return directly back to the pond. The Certikin Skimmer has additional sockets for the connection of overflow and water top up pipework.

For those of you wishing to add a pond skimmer to an existing set up we have the perfect retro fit pond skimmers such as the the Aquaforte floating skimmer or the Oase swimskim units. Our full range of pond skimmers at Dankoi would not be complete without the  Oase Standing Skimmer range both of which are an easy way to add a skimmer to an existing pond set-up.

For further information or for any queries regarding pond skimmers please don't hesitate to contact us on 01522 811330 or email us at [email protected]