Dirty pond water

[scotmo]

i have just removed sludge from the garden pond and the water is all muddy brown. How do I clean it. you cannot see anything. The filter has been running for two days now, with no improvement.

[gucciman]

how much sludge is still present on the bottom of the pond? it may be that you need a complete clean out, a real pain but you would need to completely empty the pond, store the fish and plants in some of the pond water in buckets, clean out all the sludge carefully, re-fill, condition the water with some anti-chlorine additives then reintroduce the plants and fish.
i haven't had to clean my pond out for at least 6 yrs, if i do something that stirs up the sludge of the bottom its normally resettled by the next day.
another thing you could try is a sludgebuster additive which causes all the cloudy particles to clump together and the sink to the bottom.

[Matkop]

If the sludge was made of very fine particles, they may be so small that your filter can't take them out. If so, you might need something called a 'flocculating agent', which basically causes these tiny particles to gather together into bigger clumps. These either sink back to the bottom of the pond, or are big enough to get picked up in the filter. There are quite a few available, like Koi Care 'Algiclear', SeaChem 'Clarigen', or Oase 'Aqua Activ Crystal Plus'. These sort of pond additives are available from most fish shops & large garden centres. Hope that help you!