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I cringe whenever I see artificial, stagnant and empty bodies of water like this. Water lilies all around and a thousand algae eaters. Or keep it very shallow with water jets everywhere for children to play.
“Brooks Barrett, who studies marine plant life at the Smithsonian Institution, said there’s “no quick fix” to the algae bloom in the pool.
“The reflecting pool is perfect for algae. If you were trying to biofarm algae, this would be the way to go. It’s warm, it’s stagnant, it’s perfect,” he said.”
6 million gallons of shallow water exposed to full sunlight….
What sort of pumps and flow would you need to keep it from getting stagnant?
“Trying to keep the algae at bay is a huge battle. So, they clean it each year and keep trying to keep it clean,” she said. “If this problem could have been easily solved or cheaply solved, somebody would have freaking done it.””
The reflecting pool does appear to have a continuous center strip bottom drain…
Iirc I read where the pool loses 5 million gallons a year to leakage and evaporation.. but that a large portion of the leakage isnt from the pool itself so much as from the plumbing and collapsing pipes.
The decision was made however to resurface the pool wall and floor itself rather than addressing the plumbing.
I know it took several days to refill the pool, Presumably emptying it also takes several days…. So doing significant water changes would be problematic…
I would hazard a guess that turnover filtration is far from robust as well.
Balance trumps technology in a koi pond, every time (pun not intended, lol).
Bio-filtration vs. stocking levels, water changes vs. nitrate levels, shade vs. the needs of the animals for some natural light. Algae will grow on the walls and the koi keep it mowed down neatly.
I don’t see that happening with the reflecting pool any time soon.
A 6 million gallon koi pond, though … how grand would that be!
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