Solar Powered Patio Bowl by POPOSOAP

Introduction

Hello, guys, and welcome to another What's up Aquam Migos. How are you guys doing today? So today, we're actually going to be taking a break from the Koon to build in this video, and I actually got this solar-powered pump sent to me by the brand Poposoap. It's right here inside this box, and inside that box should be a small water pump, a solar panel, and some attachments. In today's video, what I want to do is I want to use to make kind of a patio Bowl-type thing for the summertime, which I can use to maybe keep some of my guppies Outdoors again, as you've probably seen me do in the past, so I'll go ahead and put the link for this down in the description below it goes for $89 and yeah let's go ahead and get started by opening it up.

Unboxing and First Impressions

All right guys so pretty cool so if we take a look at the solar panel over here we'll see that it's almost the size of the box I mean it's a pretty decent size I'll put go ahead and put my foot next to that for some reference and then we have the pump over here if we take a look at the front of the pump there's a knob right there that you can turn and the instructions say that that's called the rotary control valve so I'm not 100% sure yet what that does I'm sure I'll figure it out once I start putting it together but I'm guessing it probably has something to do with controlling the water flow because as you can see there is a plus and minus symbol so I'm assuming plus will be for higher flow minus will be for lower flow but yeah let's go ahead and see and these look like some uh extra pre-filters for the front end of the pump if we go ahead and open the pump up real quick um we'll see that there is one of those um sponges in here so I'm going to go ahead and put this thing together and I'm going to start off by hosing out that pre-molded mini Pond that I have and I'm going to set it up probably like right here would be nice if I set it up basically like maybe in front of that small table.

Setting Up the Patio Bowl

All right, guys, so I'm filling it up with water right now, but I'm probably only going to fill it up about halfway because I'm not actually entirely sure I'm going to leave this here. I might end up moving it somewhere else, but just to test it out for today and, uh, make sure everything works, I'll set it up here for now. I was just taking a look at the instructions, and I thought this was pretty cool. There's an optional battery backup that I guess you can buy to help Supply Power to the pump even when there's not enough sunlight, so that's actually pretty cool so the pump can actually keep running even when the sun's not out.

Testing the Fountain

All right, guys, so this is what we have so far. I went ahead and attached like the fountain attachment to the top so that it'll stick out of the water and make a little Fountain and also so I went ahead and turned the knob all the way to the plus side W I'm actually really impressed by how high the water is actually spraying just purely from that solar panel supplying power and watch when I walk in front of the solar panel and create a little bit of shade of over it watch this so now I completely blocked the solar panel and the water completely stopped spraying and as soon as I move away it goes again that's crazy who this one here is probably my favorite Fountain Head attachment it's like it almost makes like a half sphere wo that is so cool.

Building a Mini Pond Filter

All right guys so so far far I think this is pretty cool but what I would like to do is I would like to take it a step further and build kind of a mini pond filter some of you guys may remember that a long time ago I made a mini pond filter for my indoor guppy Pond and I actually have it inside the the big koi pond right now just temporarily to get some water movement in there so that the water's not stagnant but pretty much what I did is I got one of those planter buckets I put a pond pump inside it and I filled the planter with lava rocks to act as biological filtration I feel like I could do something similar with this one the only downside of the setup that I have right now is that I don't have that backup battery so there won't be any filtration for during the night time but the good thing is is that the entire filter will be submerged in water so hopefully we won't lose that beneficial bacteria but of course I'm going to have to test it out and then if I find that I need to get that battery I'll I'll go ahead and get that just to keep the filtration going 24/7 but I'm going to go ahead and make a small biof filter for this pump right now.

The Idea Behind the Filter

All right guys so basically the idea behind this mini pond filter is that the pump is at the bottom of that bucket and on top of that is a bunch of lava rocks I could even add some more in there I still have some more room for even more lava rocks so what happens is the water from the pond will get sucked down into that pump but to reach the pump the water has to pass through all those lava rocks and over time the lava rocks will colonize the beneficial bacteria which will convert the ammonia from fish waste into nitrites and then into nitrates now if I was planning on adding fish to this right now which I'm not going to right now but if I was what I would have done is instead of putting new lava rocks in that bucket I would have went over here and opened up one of my pond filters and taken some lava rocks out of these trash cans this is my biological filtration for the pool pond and both of those trash hands are filled with lava rocks so if I did want to add fish to that mini Pond right now I would have just taken lava rocks out of these because these lava rocks AKA filter media is already cycled with that beneficial bacteria so I would have went ahead and added those instead of brand new lava rocks now if you're someone who doesn't already own a pond or an aquarium and this is your first time attempting to make a pond you can use brand new lava rocks like I just just did right now but you're going to have to cycle them here where I live our tap water does have a small amount of ammonia in it one part per million ammonia if you're trying to cycle your pond from scratch what you need to do is probably add something like API quick start that's the one that I sometimes use it's called API quick start basically it it helps jump start the nitrogen cycle in your pond or aquarium and then what you want to do is you want to test your water parameters get yourself a test kit like the API master test kit and see where your water parameters are at if your water does not have an ammonia reading you're going to want to add ammonia to your water one way you can do that is by adding fish food just add fish food to your water over the course of a few days and see if you get an ammonia spike in your test kit then just let your filter run and just keep testing your water once you're getting a zero part per million ammonia reading a zero part perm million nitrite reading and you are getting a nitrate reading that means that your pond is cycled and can go ahead and safely add fish but don't add too many fish because that will Spike the ammonia again so you don't want to add too many fish and you want to make sure that your pond filter is cycled but yeah also if I was trying to keep fish in here I would also need that extra battery supply to store power um during the night time so the pump doesn't just randomly turn off and then we'd get an ammonia Spike and you know that would create problems but yeah I'm really impressed so far by this popo soap solar powered pond filter once again I will have the Amazon link to it down in the description below I think for the cost of $89 I think that's actually pretty good and I was not expecting the solar panel to be that big so I mean that thing is definitely or at least it seems to be like it's pretty strong the Amazon page says that this is a 320g per hour pump so anyways guys that's going to be just about it for this video I have more videos coming on the koi pond really soon and actually before I close out this video I want to feed my fish really.