Garden water features, pond chemicals ... test kits, salt in ponds
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SALT AND OTHER CHEMICALS I have made mention of salt use in garden and koi ponds in previous issues. It keeps coming up. Let me ask you a question ..... have you ever seen anyone deliberately walking around a lake, pond, farm dam or whatever containing fish (carp specifically) and throwing in salt? You can see I am passionate about NOT adding "things" to ponds. Let me explain .... Salt in a garden or koi pond IF it does any good at all is a mild tonic. Its effect IF ANY can only happen over a long period of time. Salt is an aggressive chemical which in certain circumstances can be lethal as you will see in a moment. The real technical applications for adding salt to a koi pond involve things like modifying osmotic pressure effects, to change electrolyte concentrations to reduce so called stress etc ... don't worry you do not need to know. This kind of justification for adding salt to ponds is beyond my capacity to
understand. On that basis alone I reject the concept ... and of course I have
never seen anyone throwing salt into my local lake which holds carp (after all
koi are just sensitive carp) anyway. These two chemicals can then react together under certain circumstances to
produce chlorine which is deadly even in small amounts. More on chemicals and what they do and don't do next time. The biofilter
properly sized, installed and maintained prevents more than 90% of all pond
problems.
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