Pond skimmers are devices that suck water in from the surface of the pond and run it through a net or mesh of some sort to trap debris and eject the water somewhere else (possibly passing it through a more serious filter first).

I asked our workers to put one together using most of the same engineering that seems to be working for the regeneration zone circulation pumps. The difference here is that the water will be sucked in from a vertically oriented PVC pipe and then redirected out 45 degrees downwards using the long tail boat shaft and propeller that I used on the pumps.

Here are some pictures of the installation:

You get a bit of an idea about the layout by looking at the bottom picture. The motor is mounted inside the “pump shack” that is being built and drives the long tail shaft by a belt. (Pulley is visible in the top picture.) The shaft extends downwards at a 45 degree angle and enters the back of the PVC pipe (unfortunately the water level has already risen to the point that you can’t see it). The PVC pipe has a 45 degree angled connection between the vertical section (visible in the middle picture) and the lower section (hidden under water) which contains the impeller. Thus, once the water level rises above the top, water would be sucked in from the top and expelled at 45 degrees downwards into the pond. I am also hoping that this 45 degree downwards outflow will help create a vertical circulation so that surface water moves down to the depths of the pond and water at the bottom eventually surfaces. It is best not to have stagnant water sitting anywhere in the pond for long periods of time.

An interesting final part that I am still working out is a piece of piping that will slide inside of the vertical piece and will have floats on top to float it to the top. Inside it will have the fishing net or something similar to trap the debris. With the floats, it will rise and fall within the vertical pipe shown above so that it is always sucking water from the top few centimeters of the pond and the mesh will catch leaves, etc. that get drawn in.