Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Tony,
I asked a friend of mine who works in a water testing lab this:


this is the reply I got back:

Well that helps ..... well kind of anyway

To have acidic gases in the water... would this imply the bore is under pressure?

CO2 (yay i was right!) forms carbonic acid when dissolved in water.

Jaymie,
Thanks for the follow up with your local expert.

The bore water is pumped to a 1000 gallon header tank where it sits for a couple of days between pumping. I draw water from this header tank for toilet flushing and for garden watering. If there are dissolved gases, I would expect them to be released in the header tank, well before it was added to my fish pond.
The only time the bore water is used directly on the garden is during a reticulation sequence, where the header tank float switch operates the bore and the bore water passes thru a one way valve to the reticulation. THe feed to the header tank limits maximum reticulation pressure This is separate from the garden hose and toilet cistern feeds, direct from the header tank..

EUREKA ! ! !
I have overcome the persistent algae issue.
As some of you know, I live on a small property and have a few sheep. The sheep water trough is an old bath tub, which is under some trees at the edge of the paddock.

A few weeks ago we shifted the bath tub so that sheep could access it from either side of the fence and we noticed that while a little murky from the leaves which had accumulated in the bottom, the water was pretty clear and ALGAE FREE.

I have taken a few leaves from the trees over the bath tub and placed them in this pond.

The algae has cleared from the water (some still on the sides of the pond) and I can see the fish again. This happened over about 2-3 weeks after adding the leaves.

The goldfish are still alive.

Today I changed out the water from the pond and added more leaves from THAT tree.

Not being a person who can identify plants (yes it is a tree - is about the extent of my knowledge), I have asked Faye to see if she can identify itfrom a sample I have given her.
I have also have provided a small amount of the leaves to Joel to trial in some of his ponds which are suffering algae issues.

Sheep eat the leaves and have not suffered any problems from it.

I will post photos as soon as my batteries have recharged.

Tony

Sweet

Here are the photos of the trees:

Can anyone identify this tree?

Thanks,
Tony

is it a native ??

Not native, looks like what is sometimes called coral tree or pride of China but I could be wrong as the leaves appear a little too glossy. Hard to tell from photos, can you get mores showing the growth form of the tree and any nuts/berries?

it performed a miracle - must be moringa

Definite possibility

Definitely not Moringa.
I doubt that it is a native tree.
They grow to about 8M tall as can be seen in the photo below.
Joel thought it may be some relation to a pepper tree, but couldn't identify it.
Here is a photo of the tree bark and one of a row of the trees to give you an idea of the size of them - sorry for shifted image at dusk.

How many leaves have you added all up to the system Tony?

It's quite possible that the effect you're seeing is a proliferation of bacteria that specialise in breaking down decaying plant material. To do this, they need a quantity of Carbon to utilise as food while they also soak up Nitrogen as they multiply and use it for cell wall production and growth. Pretty similar effect to that which you see if you add material to a compost heap that is either too high in C, with little N or too high in N with little C. Decomposition will usually be terrible!

The proliferation of 'green' algae would - i suspect - indicate a large population of Nitrogen utilising photosynthetic bacteria. Because our AP systems are generally devoid of any surplus Carbon (in any great quantity) the ability of bacteria that do not photosynthesise to establish is limited. The only real Carbon source is from the sun because they need to capture Carbon from the air to balance their C:N ratio.

The good thing about your experiment is that it shows the easiest way to correct an algal bloom is to add Carbon. I noticed that a fish shop i was in the other was selling chopped up straw (similar to what you'd use for compost) to ameliorate green algal proliferation (Increase C supply = better environment for decomposing bacteria).

The down side is that if the addition of Carbon is needed to bring the system back into balance then it probably means that there is more room for more vegies to be grown !!

Wow, this turned out to be quite a long post!

Chatty

To be specific Chatty... the straw would have been barley... it's been used for algael control for years...