Thanks everyone! New filter now up and ...... well the water is passing
thru' Take a few weeks before we can say it's running I guess. I fed the
fish sparingly for the three days. Put in a 600 gph pump to just shoot the
water up a foot or so which seemed to handle the aeration issue.

Tested the water last night -
pH 8.0
Amonia none
Nitrite/Nitrate .1 5
Gh/Kh 140/100

The only change was the hardness measurements had increased from the last
test I did.

The new filter is my version of the Skippy filter. We used a 100 gal
stocktank. Size will do a 3,000 pond. Ours is 1,800 to 2,000. Since I
don't have ready access to the filter media they use we put plastic
strapping from boxes in laundry bags as the first layer after the grating,
then a layer of furnace filter - a hard blue mesh stuff 1" thick, then on
top a softer furnace filter, like a felt - 1/4" thick and finer textured.
On the very top - all the water hyacinths that would fit. Time will tell
how well this works.

While we have a huge supply of lava rock, when we pulled apart the old
filter we could see how gummed up it was with mud trapped in all the lava.
Maybe I didn't rinse it often enough. For this reason we have not used it
this time. I may be inclined to add another grate at the top with a very
thin layer of lava rock as all the stuff in there now keeps floating up. A
2" layer should hose thru easier.

Thanks again,
Heather
SW Ontario