This Solar Powered Pond Fountain from Poposoap was sent to me for this review. Contains affiliate links. You can buy it from Amazon, here.
You may have noticed that I’m writing rather less content on these pages and that’s because I just don’t have time to review things for the sake of it any longer (sobs in ‘real job’) – however when Poposoap offered me a solar powered pond fountain I thought ‘yes, I actually need one of those’ and so here we are.
I have a small pond in my front garden which I absolutely adore. It was one of the things that made me think ‘I can see myself living here’ and on a sunny morning you’ll often find me with a cup of tea in hand, sat on my garden bench, watching the fish who have miraculously survived the entire year that they’ve been in my care
Originally it had a mains-powered waterfall filter pump which is wired directly into the house. This sounds impressive until you discover the power button is hidden somewhere behind the undergrowth, meaning turning it on involves rummaging around in the shrubbery like you’re trying to access a secret bunker.
It’s also loud. Not just ‘pleasant trickling water‘ loud, but ‘you will wake up every time you get up for the loo at 3am‘ loud, which means it cannot run overnight – the number of times I’ve had to go downstairs in my PJs at 11pm to turn it off is… too many.
To make matters worse, the clasps on the lid broke some time before I moved here, so the unit no longer seals properly. This means you can’t really use filtration media inside it without it causing a blockage, spilling water out of the sides and accidentally draining the pond, which rather defeats the point of owning a filter.
So for a while the pond sat there doing what neglected ponds do best: slowly turning green.
The First Attempt: The Clear Out (And a Cheap Solar Fountain That Did Nothing)
My first attempt to fix this problem was to drain the pond, scrub it and then refill it. Must have been that new house energy; the thought fills me with dread now.
After re-filling with non-green water, I added one of those cheap floating solar fountains you can find everywhere online, some barley straw and some pond plants to see if they could get rid of the green.
The fountain technically worked in the sense that water came out of it when the sun was shining directly on it and it felt like cooperating. However, it did absolutely little to improve the water quality and quickly started looking like a science experiment as algae built up on it.
The pond was still green. I just had a lot of plants and a small decorative geyser in the middle of it.
Enter the POPOSOAP Solar Pond Filter with Water Fountain
Which brings me to the POPOSOAP Solar Pond Filter with Water Fountain, which I was offered for a review and I thought I will give this a go. The fish, who didn’t care about the colour of the water, had loads of babies and getting everything out of the pond to clean it again would be impossible; something else had to happen.
So I put the flimsy solar fountain in the bin, and boy did it feel good to do so.
This one is slightly more serious than the floating discs you usually see. Instead of just pumping water into the air, it actually includes a proper filtration system as well.
The POPOSOAP Solar Pond Filter with Water Fountain works from an 8W solar panel and has a 3600mAh rechargeable battery, which means it stores excess solar energy and can keep running when the sun disappears behind clouds. It stops automatically at sunset, which is actually quite helpful because it means no night-time water noise.
No wiring, no plugs and no digging around in the garden trying to find the power switch.
Actual Filtration (The Important Bit)
The biggest difference with this system is that it includes dual-stage filtration.
In simple terms:
- The mechanical filters (that’s the sponges) catch debris and sludge
- The biological media (ceramic rings and bio balls) help maintain water balance by playing host to good bacteria which change ammonia to harmless nitrates. NB I am always happy to talk to anyone at length about pond filtration, the nitrogen cycle and fishkeeping in general but I won’t, for now.
This is the part my cheap floating fountain with its teeny sponge was completely missing.
The filter box also protects the pump itself from debris, which should help prevent the usual fate of garden pumps: slowly clogging up and giving up on life.
There’s also water shortage protection, so if the water level drops too low the pump switches itself off rather than burning out.
Water Features and Setup
The fountain includes eight different spray nozzles, so you can change the style of the water spray depending on what you want the pond to look like.
It also comes with clear tubing and a cable long enough to create a small waterfall setup, which is useful if you want circulating water rather than just a fountain spray. This might be something I investigate more in the summer.
Setup is fairly straightforward and, crucially, no external electricity is required. If you have a small pond, bird bath, or water feature that you don’t want to wire into the mains, that’s a big advantage.
Simply place the filter itself in the pond, and then the connected solar panel (about the size of an A4 piece of paper) somewhere where it will get as much sun as possible on it.
I had to play around a bit with the fountain attachments to find one which worked – I chose this two-piece spray fountain, because I didn’t want the sun hitting it and then it spraying all of the water outside of the pond.
Maintenance (Which I Am Very Interested In)
Maintaining filters is my least favourite part of fishkeeping (which is why I love pond plants – but that’s for another day).
One of the nicer design features is the easy-access clips on the filter lid, which make cleaning much easier.
Given my previous experience with broken clips and accidental pond drainage, this is reassuring. It has been running in my pond for a few weeks, but on the next sunny weekend I will remove it, give it a rinse out (with pond water, don’t worry!) and report back on how much gunk there was, as it’s fair to say the pond definitely looks less murky than it did.
Price
The RRP is £59.99, although it’s currently available for £53.99, which seems fair. My crappy solar foutain, which I unceremoniously chucked in the bin, was around £20 and this offers a great deal more; considering it includes both a sturdy solar pump and a filtration system, that’s fairly reasonable.
Final thoughts on the POPOSOAP Solar Pond Filter
If your pond is currently doing its best impression of a murky swamp, simply adding a decorative solar fountain probably won’t solve the problem. I learned this the hard way. Chucking in chemicals is ill advised.
In addition to some pond plants, something that actually circulates and filters the water makes far more sense.
The POPOSOAP solar pond filter fountain feels like a sensible middle ground between cheap floating fountains and full mains-powered filtration systems. It’s solar-powered, reasonably powerful for small ponds, and most importantly it actually attempts to keep the water clean.
Which is really all I wanted from my pond in the first place. Buy it from Amazon, here.