Pumps for a Dummy Pond Owner

A small backyard pond

Unlike some websites, we routinely check our content for dead links (each page is checked about once every three months). In the process, our staffers sometimes come across a freelancer whose name they haven't seen lately, someone whose qualifications are so sterling as to demand that we search their body of work for more nominations. That's what happened today: we ran across eHow's Jan Goldfield, already a DotD in two categories. What the heck? Let's make it three, with the SFGate.com post "How to Calculate a Pond Pump's Electricity Cost."

Goldfield's delightful little post suffered mightily at the hand of the Leaf Group: her original was gutted in the process of porting it into a niche (and then to a second one: the first time was to Hunker), ending up with a mere 112 words, about a third of the DMS minimum word count. It was probably no loss, though: according to Jan's post,

"When we choose a backyard pond pump, one of the important things to know it how much it will cost to operate it..."

We don't think so: we think that the pump's capacity is the most important factor, followed by its quality. Capacity and pond design are the biggest factors in determining the wattage of the pump, which ultimately controls its electricity usage. But what do we know? Goldfield pounded out at least a dozen posts about pond pumps, so maybe she is an expert. What she is not, however, is an expert on electricity costs. Here's the sole step that made it from eHow:

"For illustration purposes only. Based on $ 0.10 per Kilowatt Hour and 12 months continuous use. Your actual costs may vary depending on your cost per KWH, head height, tubing diameter and actual use. Watts divided by 1000 = Kilowatts x $ 0.10 per KWH (Kilowatt Hour) x 24 hours x 365 days."

We kid you not: the two quotes above are the entire post! And the bit about "head height, tubing diameter"? That's how you size a pump in the first place! Whatever the case, we used the Wayback Machine at Archive.org to look at Jan's original. According to her original introduction,

"The pump can easily cost $30.00 a month to operate..."

Jan used a 10¢/KWH figure, which suggests that her sample pump uses about 10 KWH per day. That's 10,000 watts over 24 hours, suggesting that she envisions a pump that consumes 400-plus watts or about a ½-HP pump. A little googling suggests that such a pump has a capacity of around 5,000 gallons per hour – a good size for a 10,000-gallon pond. That ain't a pond, that's a swimming pool (or a stock pond, which aren't pumped, FWIW). Typical backyard pond pumps operate at about 10-15% of that wattage. Expert on ponds or not, Goldfield's original post managed – albeit rather clumsily – to correctly explain how to calculate the cost to operate a pump. Her transported version? not so much. That, the clumsiness of her original, and the odd assumption of a massive pump for a backyard pond suggest that she deserves her third Dumbass of the Day award.

[NOTE: the URL of the original eHow post is www.ehow.com/how_2301873_calculate-pond-pumps-electricity-cost.html . You can find it using the Wayback machine.]

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