Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Product sources The Pond Hippo

I got my new pond hippo in the mail today:


It actually worked really good sucking duckweed and filamentous algae off of our trial pond. It will have many uses for many situations. We filled several large filter bags full of 100's of lbs of duckweed in a few hours of work this afternoon. If you can catch the wind right you can suck off lots of duckweed in a hurry. We didnt have any wind so we used our duckweed boom to bring it over to the hippo.


While we were impressed with the machine, it does have some limitations and does require manual labor to get the job done. Overall its a great product that will make many small pond owners or lakefront cove owners very happy. It easily sucks up algae, leaves, duckweed, and watermeal. Also sucks up large tadpoles, frogs, and a few other items that got a little to close to us during our experiments.

How does it work Nate?

He looks friendly.

Hippos kill more people in Africa than lions, elephants and water buffalo... You guys were brave getting in the water with a hungry hungry hippo!

The pond hippo has some sort of submersible pump underneath that pumps a few thousand gallons per hour and just sucks all the crap off the top of the water. If the wind is blowing stuff into one corner it will work awesome! We have a big duckweed boom (the gray pvc rope thing in the picture) that skims surface stuff so we just used that to bring the duckweed and algae in.

The debris is filled into these mesh bags of some sort and the water goes right back into the pond. We filled a couple bags too full and could not lift them.

I will take some better pics and a vid next week.

It'll suck up to 2" dia stuff, won't it? I think that as long as the stuff is flexible (not like sticks) it would work fine. It looks like the perfect tool for DW, WM and floating leaves. My only concern if I had a business doing it would be transferring WM to a pond that only had DW problem if the filter socks were reused. Is there a way to sterilize or sanitize the filters?

Cool product. A little pricey but if it works well against duckweed and watermeal it could be worth the price for some pond owners.

PS, I'm very thankful that this thread has nothing to do with me. I was concerned when I read the subject name.

I think for the price it would be well worth it for a pond management business, or some municipalities. Didn't we have one city/town that had a DW problem right before the 4th of July that needed to be cleaned up for the Holidays?

I could see TPF having one, but in a Frog face instead of a Hippo.

I wonder if that hippo can devour as much as Nate and Justin?!?!

Thanks for posting the link Paul. I wonder how it would handle suspended clay.

Does the crap collected have any beneficial after-life use, like garden fertilizer or similar?

I'd think it would compost into good garden material.

Believe me I have definitely thought of ideas for harvesting and selling excess aquatic vegetation.......Lets create a market fellas....

JHAP has already explored an entire organic foods product line based on aquatic vegetation.
We need a link...

One would think there's a way to batter, bruise, crush or heat the DW and WM so it could be thrown right back into the pond. Little or no work (Work!)required that way.

I'm also wondering how it handles FA, which has a way of accumulating and tangling machinery of any kind.