There are various reasons to introduce a pump to your pond such as for filtration, powering a fountain or powering a waterfall. Whatever the desired outcome, you want to move water and that’s what the pump is for. How much water you want to move and where you want to move it to will affect the choice you make when choosing a pump.

Small ‘feature’ pumps are designed to move relatively small volumes of water for features such as bubble fountains. These pumps will typically come supplied with a fountain head or similar and are an easy, ‘out of the box’ solution for many needs.

For a similar purpose, but on a bigger scale, the more traditional pond pump is still a common tool. Basically this is just a scaled up version of the feature pump and will move larger volumes of water through features such as fountains and waterfalls. This type of pump usually has a prefilter fitted to minimise wear and tear from potentially damaging particles such as silt.

The most modern type of pump and also the most powerful, are solids handling pumps. These are highly specified pumps that are designed to allow a reasonable level of debris to pass through their mechanism without causing damage. These pumps have become widely used to accommodate the demands for both reliability and power created by biological filtration systems. Obviously, these powerful pumps will power some impressive fountains. However, even assuming that you are fortunate enough to have sufficient space for such an impressive upwards flow of water, it is not recommended to be flinging bits of debris into the air. As such these are generally used purely to circulate water or possibly to power a waterfall.