Video Transcript: You know, you are searching around on a pond website and you are looking for water treatments and you hit that water treatment page, and all of a sudden you said, “Oh, my gosh. What is all these stuff?” I want to just kind of quickly go over the different types of water treatments you are going to find and what they do, or what are they for. And the first thing we are going to talk about is ammonia control. A lot of times if you are having some fish health issues it is caused by a build-up of ammonia. So the first thing you are going to want to do with almost any kind of a problem in your pond, if you said, “Man, there is something wrong.” Is to get a test kit. The test kit is first and then if your results are showing high ammonia, then, you would click on the ammonia control button, and find all the products that will be used to get rid of ammonia. Because it tends to build-up when you really got an overstock pond and it can wipe out a lot of your fish in a hurry.
Now, if you just thrown a bunch of goldfish in, pond treatments can sometimes be expensive by the time they are shipped to you. You can always start over with a few less koi or if you’ve got a bunch of koi and you are like, “Oh, my man. I don’t want these guys to die.” Then while we sort out the root cause of this problem you need it to be treated immediately for ammonia and getting that down. Now, chlorine remover is for when you add fresh water to your pond from city water or any kind of treated water, we will just call that city water and something out of tap, tap water would have a chlorine in it. It keeps us safe when we drink it, but it is harmful to your fish. So using a de-chlorinator when you are first adding water to your pond, and anytime you add a significant amount of water. During the summer if you’ve lost a few inches of water and you are going to add quite a bit, throw in just a little bit of dechlorine. Now, you know, it is like a laundry detergent; more is not better so follow the instructions. If you are just going to put in a little bit take a look at the bottle, depending on the size that you have, and it is going to tell you how many ounces to put in for roughly how many gallons of water you are going to put in, you don’t need a whole bottle if you are just going to add you know, 50 gallons of water. A few drops will probably do you. So keep in mind, more is not better.
Now, fountain treatments; these are treatments for fountains that are normally in a, let’s say, inside a building. You know, if you are in the lobby of your building and you have a fountain. Most of these fountain treatments can be used without even worrying about the label. Now, if you have a fountain outside and it is also used for birds. If birds drink from the water be careful, because some of the fountain treatments are toxic to birds, so you want to check that and of course, some are toxic to fish. So be sure that you are buying a fountain treatment that is safe for whatever is going to have access to that water. Now, fountain treatments are very effective mainly because you don’t care what they kill. So, if you’ve got indoor fountain, knock yourself out. Don’t use bleach. A lot of people will say, “I will just use bleach. It is cheap.” Well, it is cheap, it works great, and it also will eat the heck out of some types of pumps depending on the type of pump you have. So you know better safe than sorry and stay away from bleach.
Beneficial bacteria or microblift, you will also see it will also see Microbe-Lift listed by itself. Microbe-Lift manufacturers the most popular brand of beneficial bacteria. This is good bacteria. It is a product that you add to your filtration system normally early in the season and because all the bacteria, the good bacteria that has been working for you and keeping your pond clean dies during very cold weather and this is called reseeding and you reseed to reseed your bacteria. Now, bacteria comes in different forms. You can buy it in a powder form or in liquid form. With powder form, it is a little bit more involved because you don’t just throw it in. Typically, you will mix it with warm water and let it sit and follow the instructions and then add it. Most of the Microbe-Lifts are just shake it up and pour it in and follow the instructions.
Defoamer. A lot of times – there may be an issue in your pond that is causing this- but you will start to build up a lot of foam around your water fall and defoamer is great. I mean, it is something where you just, because you have so much action in your falls and just a little bit of the leaves are falling right now, and so you are getting a lot of foam. There is a problem and you know that you are going to have to take care of it, and you got to get the netting up, they are going to take care of the leaves, but in the meantime a little bit of defoamer, and this stuff lasts forever so you don’t have to worry about it going bad on you. Throw the defoamer in and that foam is instantly gone. It is magic you know. Algae control – they made it hard on us, but a lot of the old algae controls worked great and now we can’t get them anymore because I guess they were finding their way into natural landscaping and hurting our ecosystem. So we are a little bit more limited these days, but you want to figure out what kind of algae you have and then look for the solution accordingly. Now, if you got the floating algae or the blanket weed algae, sometimes called hair algae you want to look for treatment for that. If it is just green water where, if you dipped a jar in the water I can’t tell you how many times at the pond store we talked to customers about this.
We had a pond store, big indoor store and all the outdoor ponds and people would show up with a container of water and just always you know, bringing us their green water to show us. And the businesses alongside ours were thinking we are taking this kind of weird currency. You know, people were paying in jars of in water. So that is a pretty typical problem and it is a seasonal issue and you can find some algae control products to handle that. Barley, I separate out barley straw because that is kind of a unique treatment and it is usually kind of a mini hay bales typically or wrapped in netting and you drop that in, and some people just swear by barley as a way to keep down and kind of prevent algae from growing. If you have a lot of algae already, adding barley is probably a little too late so you want to clean that up, use your algae control, and then add barley once you’ve got it cleared up. Fish health, if you’ve got injuries or illness with your fish, that’s where you are going to look and find the treatments for it. If you see a fish rubbing along rocks, scraping, if they have sores, that’s where you want to go in and look in your fish health products and find the solution. It is a pretty in-depth topic so we will cover that in a different section, but if your fish were sick, fish health is where you want to be looking. Ph control is one more thing is sort of like ammonia control. If you discovered in your test kit that you have high or low Ph then there’s products that can raise and lower the Ph, and the last thing is pond clarifiers.
Now, those are often called flocculants. And a lot of times, let’s say, you got that green water and it is just that everything is kind of murky and you’ve got a good filtration system, but the stuff is so small it is just going right through your filter and it is not getting caught. Now, that is where the pond clarifiers work great. They tend to clump all of that algae together in the clumps that are large enough to be taken out by your filtration. So if you’ve got that problem, where it is just like you kind of got all these little particles that are not getting caught in the filter, pond clarifiers are fantastic for that. A word of caution, once again, follow instructions. So many people put way too much of that product in and it can be harmful when you start clumping all that together, because of some side effects where it kind of cut off the oxygen in your pond, and if you have overdone it, you will see your fish kind of gasping. There have been some fish kills where people are just you know, if you read the bottle it says it just treats 3,000 gallons and then somebody has a 300 gallon pond and they are like, “Yeah. But you know this will be better.” And they pour the whole bottle in. So follow the instructions. You can really harm your fish more by over-treating sometimes than just letting things go. I wiped out some just beautiful koi that I had in a tank I was treating them, it was after a full day at the shop and I came back in late, and it was probably midnight and I thought now I got to go and do another treatment, and I screwed it up. I looked to the bottle, I knew better, I put way too much in and the next morning all my very nice koi were dead, so don’t over treat. No matter what you are treating for, follow the instructions you know, err on the light side.
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