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When I built my own pond in my back yard in 1987, filters and skimmers were used on swimming pools, not ponds. Flexible, rubber-liner ponds had not yet been heard of. I used a PVC liner that was meant to be used as a liner in sanitary landfills. A pond pump was bright blue and normally used as a sump pump in leaky basements. Shortly after I started building ponds commercially, a few companies started building pumps especially for ponds, made them black and in different sizes. We connected the pump to a garden hose to run water over a waterfall. If we wanted two streams of water over the falls, we used a hose divider to get those two streams. The largest pond pump was 1,200 gallons per hour.

The pond market grows
Within a couple of years, companies realized that backyard ponds represented the niche market of the future and started making products strictly for ponds. We had bigger pumps, special hoses, special dividers and now needed hose clamps. Our liner choice was still laminated PVC.

But the market grew and opportunists arrived. Until skimmers and filters were marketed, no one needed them. Koi pond enthusiasts were already using elaborate swimming pool filters. I was known to remark that the filtration system of a koi pond looked a bit like a heart-lung machine. If you wanted a pond with goldfish and plants, you did not need a filter, nor a skimmer. You still don't.

The new pond companies that were proliferating throughout the country began to convince pond installers and do-it-yourselfers that filtration was a necessity and no pond would work unless it had a skimmer.