I did get some writing done, amid all the chaos, Lynn’s been working on Joomla! through two serious personal crises and says she’s really close to testing; we got the bug fixed and I ousted 2 spammers from our midst. If your user name is ILoseWeightAskMe, you’re toast.
Fighting a real battle with algae in the pond, but it’s just summer. I have to clean the filter often to give the UV light enough flow-through (speed of water movement) to get the job done. When I take the filter out it’s 5 pounds heavier than when I put it back in.
And we are fighting another battle with the heating and the new light on the marine tank—but I think we have got it now. Setting the heater is an art form. No tank heater ever made has an accurate thermostat that I have ever found: you set it under what you want but higher than disaster, let the lights run, and then see if you’re still in the safety zone: the metal halide lamp we use in the marine tank is so intense you cannot safely look at it, and it is hot. I’ve been running a 13,000 and went back to a 10,000k, and it’s hotter, by considerable, so it screwed up our heat budget: it’s dangerous if corals get to 85 degrees, and Jane caught it at 84.3. We floated bags of ice in the sump, turned off the lights, cooled it down slowly, and then started up again. I think I had a heater going screwy, combined with the change in the lighting.
You might try barley. We use sheets of barley in our outdoor pond to control the algae. There is some kind of enzyme interaction that breaks down the structure of the algae. You can find some at petco for sure.
We have some, and that is just about the only ‘chemical’ we use, because we have lots of pond worms and bugs, which the koi enjoy, besides eating the algae. It’s great. I use Microlift Barley Extract, which is really efficient without having to chase barley bales out of the skimmer. 😆
I wonder if you can get that in Spain. having added a hugely expensive truckload of water to make up for evaporation, we have a bit too much phosphate in the pond (plus extra extra heat this week), and algae develops on the steps and underwater plank seat … nasty! the proper feed has a special phosphate filter – 5 foot of black earth.
we put barley bales in the village pond here! its magic.
how big are those koi going to get?
We are hoping they grow very slowly. They’re fun at this size, because they dart. But they’ve doubled in size this summer, their max size is three feet, but those are very, very old koi, and they live a very long time. If they get above a foot in length we may have to find homes for a few.
One wonders if the change in lamp from 13000K to 10000K increases the amount of infrared and near-infrared radiation going into the water? I’m no expert on chromatics and light in general, but I believe the lower in the Kelvin scale you go with light, the more infrared, and thereby more heat.
Glad Jane caught the thing before it got really bad. Even when I was diving on Guam, the water temperature never got above 82 or so, and of course, the deeper you go, the cooler the water, since the infrared from Old Sol isn’t penetrating the water that deeply. But, alas, I’d also seen the damage we do to coral reefs first hand, areas of dead elkhorn corals because they were next to a former sewage disposal duct.
Ugh! I’m thinking exactly so, the 10000k is more energetic. It’s better for coral growth than the 13000, but it may be the culprit in the heating problem. I don’t want it to go above 82, I’d rather it stayed closer to 80. But last night the temp ranged down to 78.8, and we’ll see how it does today after the lights have been on. Equilibrating the temperature between day/night in a tank with metal halides is very much a balancing act, and it may oscillate a bit because of the rock (we have a lot) and sand holding the prior condition longer than the water does. Plus this water is in two environments: it cycles from the display tank in the upstairs, down to the sump in the basement, where it’s cooler, passes the heater and a warm water-cooled pump on its way up to the living room again. The corals looked pretty happy yesterday. Here’s hoping it’s going to straighten itself out.