Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I lost about 20 gold fish and 2 algae eaters. Each one had a milky film on them. I did a 50% water change one day and another 50% water change the the next day. I did a water reading and both times ammonia and nitrite - 0, nitrate 20-80, PH 7.6.

I live in North Texas and couldn't find a place that could test my water to see what kind of bacteria or disease is in my water. Since I'm not sure what is in it. I plan on killing my setup till spring and start over.

Any help or advice is appreciated. I'm not planning to kill it till sometime next week. Thanks!


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Sorry to hear about your fish.

The cost of identifying the organism might be too high anyway. There's a slight chance that if you post pics someone will recognize the problem or have some suggestions.

No guarantees having the system shut down will help but there is a good chance it will. Salting the water to help the fish build up a slime coat so they can fight off the problem or salting the water with a higher concentration of salt which can sometimes kill off the organism also can help. You can also just remove the fish and do a short salt dip at an even higher concentration.

Hope this helps

Thanks! Do you know what kind of Salt to use?

Pool salt - you should be able to find it anywhere that sells swimming pool supplies, hardware stores, that sort of thing. A lot of people run 1-3 parts per thousand all the time; strawberries don't like it, but most other plants will be quite happy.

To get one part salt per thousand, you'd put in one kilo salt per thousand liters of water. Google tells me that comes to 2.2 pounds of salt per 264 gallons.

Pool salt is the same as sodium chloride aka table salt (and this is what you want). If you don't need a lot then the bulk bins at your grocery store might have enough. You want salt without the anti-caking agents and it should be un-iodized.

Yeeeesssss... but don't buy the stuff that's being sold as table salt, because it's a lot more expensive and contains iodine and anti-caking agents.