Simply Koi and More Koi

This is Duncan's area of expertise but he is often too busy to look in here as often as he would like so I've just emailed him to pop in and answer your question.

No problem Dave, Duncan doesn't normally ignore people who email him so I guessed you might have been using his old address.

Did you use his new email address? I never put email addresses on open forums where they can be harvest by spam robots but you can contact him via his new address on this page:
http://www.koiquest.co.uk/

As an afterthought, while I don't normally recommend adding anything until you've first verified that the water parameters are within acceptable limits, since it may take time while you take these or get help in taking them, with very soft water, you may have had a pH crash so it would do no harm to...

Whenever I'm asked to diagnose a problem or explain unusual behaviour I invariably give this advice: Water parameters are the first thing to check because bad parameters can cause health problems directly or weaken the immune system so that a fish succumbs to a parasite or pathogen it could otherwis...

Daisy, You may have misunderstood what the chit chat section of this forum is for. Koi keepers who normally post in the other sections don't have to clutter those sections up with any non-koi keeping subjects they wish to discuss. They are free to start a discussion in this section where other membe...

The nitrite isn't being made by the anoxic baskets. Conventional nitrifying (nitrogen cycle) bugs are prolific in nature so there are ammonia bugs (nitrosomonas) which have already taken up residence on any wet surface in your pond. These will have begun to convert ammonia to nitrite which is what y...

As it matures, the anoxic system doesn't go through "new pond syndrome" with an ammonia spike followed by a nitrite spike because the two bacteria involved in that process (nitrosomonas and nitrobacter) are obligate aerobes which means that they can't live without an oxygen level of at lea...

Have you read my anoxic article on the link I gave? It gives all the information you would need to build an anoxic system including an explanation of exactly what happens to ammonia.

In all the years I've been promoting anoxic filtration, I can't remember anyone ever asking that question before but, yes, you can fishless cycle an anoxic pond. I've written up how to fishless cycle conventional media for my website on the link below but, with a bit of thought, you can adapt that p...

Excuse the delay Geoff, just got back from America.

What are you trying to clean off of the fibre glass algae or lime scale stains?

There is a great variability with different types of activated carbon so, with cartridge filters you pretty much get what you pay for Richard. The cheaper units tend to use cheap activated carbon in their cartridges and the flow rate through them for complete dechlorination tends to be very slow. I ...

The short answer is, yes, any leaching from bitumen based sealants will be toxic and they certainly shouldn't be used in a koi pond. You can paint the cement with a waterproof pond paint such as G4 if you wish but, if the cement line is of normal thickness and above water so that it only gets wet fr...

The serpentine path you propose is interesting but, although I've never conducted trails that aren't "in at one end and out the other" my gut feeling is that it won't make any significant difference. The water in the last drawing will make its way from the input to the output at a leisurel...

They could certainly die of suffocation overnight or indeed even quicker. Think about it in human terms, if a group of people were shut in a room with little or no ventilation, how long they could survive without suffocating would depend on the size of the room and how many people in it. With only a...