How to Maintain Your Koi Pond
When it is time to change the water in any environment that you have fish in it is not a great idea to change all of it. Any sudden enviroment changes are not a welcome thing by fish at all. This can be considered the same as pools to most people. Any change such as temperature, pH, or chemistry to the water.
If you have a good filtration system it should have a biological filter and also a mechanical filter. The filter that you are using that removes fish waste that is dissolved is the biological filter. This shouldn’t be confused with ponds in any circumstances. The filter will turn the waste into nitrite and then into nitrate. This is all done within the filter system. Nitrate is harmless to the fish but it will allow build up in your pond that can harm your fish.
There are some water plants that you can purchase which will help remove the nitrates. It will take a lot of plants to take out any amount of nitrates that you would need them to. You could try a trickle tower to remove the nitrates in your koi pond however they are not cheap and giving the water a partial change would be more cost efficient.
You should do a water change often but it only needs to be about ten percent maybe every couple weeks. When you do your water changes you should also check for nitrate levels this will prevent any discoloration in your koi pond. You can test for nitrate using a test kit that will let you measure the nitrate level, pH, nitrite, and oxygen level in your koi pond.
If you are planning to use tap water when you fill up your koi pond you should also use additives that you can buy at the store to remove chlorine that has been added to the water. Chlorine will come out of the water if it sits for a few hours also.
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 6:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.