according to the weather bureau.
It’s raining again, and looks to rain all week.
I just cleaned the pond filter yet again—the hyacinth isn’t growing, because we’re in perpetual overcast (with small intermissions)…so I built a pot filter. Pot filters are the really inexpensive way to set up a pond: we have a skimmer filter and a waterfall filter, but a pot filter as backup can be quite, quite efficient, particularly if you load it with pillow stuffing (same as they use for filter floss, only 4x cheaper) and it gets loaded with muck. You take a 5 dollar paint bucket from Lowes, you take a serious pump with a 3′ hose on it. You stuff the stuffing atop the pump in the bucket and you turn it on and let ‘er rip. It will suck pondwater—literally, through the floss, which is a finer filter than regular, and load itself up until it chokes, at which time you rinse it out and set it up again. The spendy part is the pump. The hose costs more than the bucket. And the pump I’m using, because I had a choice of 2 and the mag 5 didn’t work at first, is a mag 12, which moves a thousand gallons of water an hour. 4 hours and everything will have been through this filter once. By tomorrow it will have been through it 6 times. This should clean the water somewhat. The one thing you have to watch is stupid koi trying to investigate the pump, and I’m hoping I’ve made it inconvenient enough. The original Denys, back in OKC, lost one whisker to getting his head stuck on a pot filter pump intake (which is all we ever used for that pond) —but it didn’t affect him much.
The fish are quite disgusted because I’ve put the exit hose in amongst the hyacinth in the deep end, which is their favorite hiding spot, but if that thing swung around in reach of the bank, it could empty a third of the pond before it ran out of water and stood high and dry. That would be inconvenient, to say the least.
It started raining while I was trying to set up the pot filter and I got soaked. Jane asked why I didn’t call her to come help. Yaaah.
I am glad Jane didn’t know you were doing this. She WOULD have come out to help. Good luck in the weather and all. It’s our third day of well over 100 already here in Vegas. I have to keep putting more water into my fresh water aquarium; it evaporates so fast.
Silly Jane. No bein’ a heroine. SRSLY? Pillow stuffing! Wow.
Fervently echoing chakaal. Jane, have some brandy and stay put!
Speaking of fish, CJ, you haven’t mentioned the salt water tank in ages. How is that doing?
I am ashamed of the marine tank. Everything in there is alive, but it’s cruddy, and I haven’t had time or the strength to go in and fix it. I hate working in there with the rabbitfish (venomous) who keeps the algae down. He wouldn’t attack, but he’s stupid enough to run into your hand in a panic. I need to frag the big hammerhead coral, which is the size of a soccer ball and takes up half the tank. I need to do a massive water change, scrape the walls, catch the rabbit and trade him in for something less lethal, rearrange the rock work, trade in the torch coral, which is just a pain (too hot for its neighbors) and get the sump/refugium light replaced so the algae down in the basement will live and outcompete the crud in the main tank. Big, big maintenance need, but that hammer is still growing exponentially—every time it reproduces, it has the potential to add 30 more heads. Then 60.
That hammerhead is MASSIVE! An alien life form!
I’m really going to have to break it up. It’s a shame—for a 200 plus gallon tank it would be a spectacular display item. But it will sell for more as about 20 pieces. And it is aggressive: I’m sure that’s why corals downwind of it are not thriving and it’s always lush. That’s like seeing a big fat plum tree in your yard that’s doubling its size every year and realizing it’s sitting right over your sewer line.
For filters in fish tanks? Yes, pillow stuffing. Or polyester quilt batt, if you like flat for your filters. I used to work in a fabric store, and every six months or so one of the guys from the local Chinese live-food grocery would come in and buy a whole roll of the stuff for filters for the tanks in the store. Cheaper than the pre-made filters, he said, and just as effective.