I have a fountain/stream setup in my front yard. Water comes out of the bottom of the fountain, goes through a stream, and at the end of the stream is a pump that sends the water back to the fountain through some plastic tubing.
This being an outdoor setup, there is a lot of dirt and debris which, despite my best efforts to keep the system clean, still finds its way into the pump and clogs things. One particularly common choke point seems to be where the outlet of the plastic tubing connects back into the fountain:
It's currently going in through a barb connector. It is very common for this to be clogged by even very tiny pieces of debris that get through the pump and get stuck at the tiny opening of the barb, reducing flow through the fountain to a trickle. The solution is to briefly disconnect and reconnect the hose, which I am presently having to do almost daily because little pieces of bark from my garden are getting into it. Removing the hose, you can see that the opening the water is going into is quite small:
You can also see that the piping after it is quite wide, so there is really no reason the inlet needs to be that small. A better solution would be if I could somehow make the connector male on the tubing or otherwise have a wider opening so this was not a choke point. Any suggestions on how to do that?
Best Answer
Depending on the nature of the "fountain" - if it does not have small jets, then run larger pipe to it. If the output of your pump is all being driven through that tiny hose outlet, (which is my reading of what you wrote) there'a design flaw here someplace.
Otherwise, filters. You want a great deal of filter area so that it will continue to flow when partially clogged, so that you don't have to clean it too frequently. You definitely do not want the filters to pass anything small enough to clog the fountain jets, or any other part of the plumbing. You know full well it will have to catch a bunch of stuff, so make it big, which keeps the flow on any one section low. Then hose it out monthly or weekly or at whatever frequency it requires to maintain flow.