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  • Results 1 to 17 of 17

    Thread: First pp treatment - wow, plus upgrades

    1. #1
      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      First pp treatment - wow, plus upgrades

      First a Big thanks to Billy at Cascade and Zac from Deepwater along with a lot of others who have helped me with questions and offered advice.

      I think y'all know what an ordeal this beast of an inherited pond has been. It has consumed my every waking minute since spring and as soon as I got it up and running I immediately started identifying deficiencies and started upgrades...

      The last few weekends I disconnected all 8 of the 55 gallon strapping filled barrels from the bottom drains that were being run by an airlift which on another thread it was determined it was flowing around 3k gal per hour. Not enough. I did, upon cleaning out the barrels and making an acre sized pile of discarded strapping, determine they were sure capturing crap, they just weren't getting clean when I'd clean the barrels. The muck was thick in there and oh lord, the stench...

      That all got replaced with an ultra seive I ordered from Billy. I am in love with that beast. That's on an ES8500 that I also ordered from Billy. I couldn't believe the crap it's picking up from the bottom now. (Not that I could see the bottom, more on that later)

      Last weekend I did all the barrel conversions. 4 of them became more sand and gravel filters in parallel. Those feed 2 more barrels I turned into moving beds with K1 also ordered from Billy. Those two gravity flow back to the pond. They all already had 4 inch in and outs through uniseal so that's wasn't changed. The pump output goes into the bottom of the sand and gravel barrels via 2inch to 4 inch adapters.



      This weekend, I installed the no niche skimmer ordered from Zac. It's plumbed into what used to be the 4 inch airlift return and dumps (gravity for now) into the the airlift collector. I had to retire the airlift so that big 8 inch collector needed to be put to good use. Right now that's gravity flowing through the collector and into the 7th barrel. Right now I have a submersible in the barrel and I'm dumping the output of that into the seive but the plan is to move the ES5500 that's overloaded trying to push 2 S&G plus EVO 110 over to the new skimmer and seal the top of the collector so it can be put on pump suction.

      I'll put another 8500 where the 5500 used to be for more more flow to the other 2 S&G, shower, UV and underwater returns.

      This weekend was also the first of what will be several marathon PP treatments. I think some will recall another thread where my water was just not clearing up and I was pretty sure it wasn't algae anymore. It was just hazy and so much stuff settling on the walls and everywhere. I could see no more than a foot down. Heck, I'd never seen the baby fish after I added them a couple months ago.

      Yesterday I spent the whole day doing low doses. Still haven't got it to hold pink (forget about purple for now) for more than a half hour. It was late so I let the last dose yesterday go brown then reversed it with TS and I was pretty disappointed when I went to bed because the whole thing just looked like a big pot of coffee.

      This morning however, even though it's still brown, I can see a foot further down than I could before and all day long today I was able to see the baby fish skirting the edges of the pond, nibbling on whatever they were finding there.

      It's going to take a few more marathons to get it back into shape for all the months it ran with too little filtration and too little circulation but for the first time I feel like I'm getting ahead of it.

      Today was the first morning I could walk out there (like I do every morning, hoping to see progress, only to be met with murky water and foam) and see deeper, notice a clearing of the haze, and only the slightest bit of foam in the shower.

      I'm not gonna mention the nastiness that rolled out of the blowout on the S&G filters today after the PP yesterday .. Brown/Orange yuck. I am waiting to do the sodium percarbonate until I'm completely done with the PP series so I'll have to look at brown water for a while but it's sure better than looking at hazy water.
      Last edited by LoriP; 11-04-2018 at 09:11 PM.

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    2. #2
      abuchi123's Avatar
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      Why did you have to reverse with TS when PP was obviously spent? You are just making the next PP more difficult by having so much TS in the system.

    3. #3
      Roddy Conrad's Avatar
      Roddy Conrad is offline The Koiphen Chemist
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      My advice in this situation is to now clear the brown color with hydrogen peroxide to see the fish, wait a week, then do another marathon pp treatment if the water is now really clear. Post the volume of water in the pond, and I will recommend specifics of peroxide treatment to clear the brown color
      Last edited by Roddy Conrad; 11-05-2018 at 07:28 AM.
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      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      Quote Originally Posted by abuchi123 View Post
      Why did you have to reverse with TS when PP was obviously spent? You are just making the next PP more difficult by having so much TS in the system.
      I reversed it because it was getting too dark to see and while it looked brown, with dusk coming and the angle of the light I wanted to be sure. I've read all of Roddy's primers and informational posts so I knew it would cause me to have to wait before doing it again but since this was my first experience with it I didn't want to misjudge the color and be sorry in the morning.

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      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      Quote Originally Posted by Roddy Conrad View Post
      My advice in this situation is to now clear the brown color with hydrogen peroxide to see the fish, wait a week, then do another marathon pp treatment if the water is now really clear. Post the volume of water in the pond, and I will recommend specifics of peroxide treatment to clear the brown color
      I do not know the precise number of gallons it was preexisting. Volume calculations put it somewhere north of 16k gallon.

      To be safe I did 5 teaspoon pp each dose, mixed it in hot water in a 5 gallon bucket and poured it in so it would enter via the underwater returns.

      The water is not completely clear. The upper reaches have cleared up and I can see about 2 feet down now. The deep end is 6 feet. It's still gloomy down there. Hope that makes sense

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      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      PS. I don't have large volumes of hydrogen peroxide in a bottle. We live in the boonies. I have 10 lbs sodium percarbonate on the way, arriving tomorrow. Water is at 8.2 ph and 8 drops kh. I've read about the ph swing it can cause.

    7. #7
      ricshaw is offline Senior Member
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      Quote Originally Posted by abuchi123 View Post
      Why did you have to reverse with TS when PP was obviously spent? You are just making the next PP more difficult by having so much TS in the system.

      During the potassium permanganate treatment and hydrogen peroxide treatment... the pond water will go from wine color purple to tea color to crystal clear. The pond water clarity at the end can be better than when you started.


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    8. #8
      Roddy Conrad's Avatar
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      Quote Originally Posted by LoriP View Post
      I do not know the precise number of gallons it was preexisting. Volume calculations put it somewhere north of 16k gallon.

      To be safe I did 5 teaspoon pp each dose, mixed it in hot water in a 5 gallon bucket and poured it in so it would enter via the underwater returns.

      The water is not completely clear. The upper reaches have cleared up and I can see about 2 feet down now. The deep end is 6 feet. It's still gloomy down there. Hope that makes sense
      Assuming 8 grams per teaspoon PP, 40 gram doses since you added 5 teaspoons per dose.

      Assuming 16,000 gallons, 16,000 gallons times 8.3 pounds per gallon times 454 grams per pound gives 60,000,000 grams water or 60 million grams of water. So one part per million pp dose would be 60 grams, you are adding about 40 grams at 5 teaspoons, so each little dose was about 0.67 ppm from the information posted above. I consider a low dose PP 2 ppm, which would be 120 grams; assuming 8 grams per teaspoon would then be 15 teaspoons instead of 5, if it is 16,000 gallons. A high dose is 4 ppm, some fish folks actually dose at 10 ppm for an hour then rapidly reverse it before the fish die. To me 10 ppm dosing is a little scary, on the edge. I dosed at 4 ppm each time the first couple of years, then backed off to 2 ppm, to each his or her own practice.

      To kill brown color, I prefer to hit the pond with ~5 ppm active hydrogen peroxide.

      There are generally three ways to put doses of peroxide into a pond. For small ponds, the 3% hydrogen peroxide concentration in pints or quarts available in almost any pharmacy shelf is practical, but for a 16,000 gallons pond I prefer to use the oxidizer sold for peroxide oxidizing swimming pools (alternative to chlorine for swimming pool maintenance). There are several brands of these, and all the brands are clearly labeled to be 27% hydrogen peroxide solutions. The gallon bottles of those 27% hydrogen peroxide solutions sell in my town for $20 this year, up from $15 per gallon a few years ago.

      To hit a 16,000 gallon pond with a 5 ppm (adequate usually to turn the brown form of spent PP colorless) dose of hydrogen peroxide:

      60 million grams pond water (from the calculation above) times 5 ppm dose calculation = 300 grams active hydrogen peroxide, divide by 0.27 (27% concentration) to get 1111 grams of 27% hydrogen peroxide or one liter, or one quart, or a fourth of a gallon of swimming pool oxidizer as 27% hydrogen peroxide. Suggest you go with only a pint (2.5 ppm peroxide dose) of the 27% hydrogen peroxide, it will probably turn the water sparking clean in an hour or two. Do not make the mistake of buying a chlorine based oxidizer (solution of sodium hypochlorite) at the swimming pool or spa store, you will immediately kill all the fish! If you used the quarts of 3% hydrogen peroxide from the pharmacy, it would take 10 quarts instead of one quart, since the 27% is about 10 times the strength of the 3%, when the effect of the higher density of the higher concentration is included in the calculation.

      I typically use 250 ml (a half pint) of the 27% hydrogen peroxide oxidizer to clear up the brown color in my 4000 gallon system the next day to give that crystal clear water. My usual practice is three 2 ppm treatments in a single day, waiting for the purple/pink coloration to go away before adding another 2 ppm. That would have been, for example, in a 16,000 gallon pond 15 teaspoon doses each time done three times in a single day, starting early in the morning. Then reverse with sodium thiosulfate to make sure the active PP is gone before the sun goes down, then hit the pond the next morning with the single 27% hydrogen peroxide dose to eliminate all traces of the brown spent PP color.

      You can calculate the volume of the pond by estimating "average" length in feet times "average width in feet" times "average depth in feet" to get the cubic feet of water in the pond, then multiply the cubic feet of water times 7.48 gallons per cubic foot to get the volume of the pond in gallons (US gallons, not British imperial gallons, which is very different, since an imperial gallon is 10 pounds per gallon to my recollection).

      Gallons times 8.3 pounds per gallon times 454 grams per pound divided by one million (1,000,000) gives millions of grams water in the pond, then each one ppm of a dose of something is simply the number of millions of grams water in the pond. Simple easy stuff.

      As another point, if there is no significant wind, I simply pour the PP powder directly into the waterfall where the water drops back into the pond. If there is a strong wind, I premix it inside, because if PP powder blows into your eyes, your eyes could be destroyed to blindness. Sometimes PP powder gets directly on my hands, I wash them quickly and do not have an oxidizing burn. I suppose it is preferable to wear rubber gloves messing with it. I have two pails of PP powder, 55 pounds per pail, in my fish supplies, have used up the first 55 pound pail I bought originally, about a third of my way through the second 55 pound pail. I find it a lot more practical to buy in 55 pound pails, in small one to 5 pound quantities the price was ridiculous from my chemical processing experiences.

      Back to the hydrogen peroxide discussion, some fish folks use hydrogen peroxide to kill some parasites and bacterial infections in high density fish raising activities. The dose they quote in a flow through system is 100 ppm active hydrogen peroxide. I do not recommend that level of active peroxide for a comparatively light stocking density in a koi pond, folks that have tried that in a koi pond have sometimes killed their fish population. I limit my hydrogen peroxide doses to a maximum of 5 ppm active peroxide, and usually much less for the purpose of reacting with the spent form of PP to render it completely colorless.

      In goldfish ponds with an extremely high problem of string algae, I used sodium percarbonate powder applications to clean up the pond. Some don't like the sodium percarbonate approach, because what happens is sodium percarbonate hydrolyzes rapidly to become sodium carbonate and active hydrogen peroxide in the water. The sodium carbonate drives the pH to a value of 11, which never hurt my fish when practicing this heavy algae cure, but should only be applied to ponds where there is no detectable ammonia, because at significant ammonia concentrations, a pH of 11 will kill the fish.
      Last edited by Roddy Conrad; 11-05-2018 at 11:16 AM.
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    9. #9
      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      Thank you Dr. Conrad for the very detailed information. I've saved screen shots of the calculations you'd done for others in the past for reference.

      That is the method I used for calculating the volume. I've done it based on square (LxWxAvgDepth x 7.48) and oval (0.8xLxWxAvdDepth x 7.48) since it's "mostly square... Not really an oval..but it is dished like a bowl... Which makes it a pain to estimate. There's also a 7 inch deep half round section about 15 feet on the long side off to one side that was the previous owners" kiddie pool, beach" area.

      That's why I tried to be conservative and just dose it at what I knew to be 1ppm for 10k gallons in case I was dreadfully off on my calculations.

      26 ft wide by 25 long x Avg of 4 ft. (2 in the shallow end, 6 in the deep end) mostly square but I used the oval calculation to offset for the sloped sides and added back in 1k for the filters and the "kiddie pool" as I call it. Clear as mud?

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      tbullard is offline Senior Member
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      You could use the salt method to get a more accurate measurement. Here is the calculator https://www.koiphen.com/forums/koicalcs.php?do=calcsalt

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      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      Thank you. I've used the calculator but haven't yet decided I want to dump that much salt into the pond. I've never seen nitrites yet so I've been holding off on that

    12. #12
      Roddy Conrad's Avatar
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      I stopped using salt because water exchanges run across my lawn killing the grass when I have used salt in the pond.
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      I am curious... I really want a Drum filter. I have been in the hobby for about 20 years. i have seen all the next big things, and done a few. But the drum filters seem like the real deal. And to me you'd have been the perfect candidate to get one of em....
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      Quote Originally Posted by lukef View Post
      I am curious... I really want a Drum filter. I have been in the hobby for about 20 years. i have seen all the next big things, and done a few. But the drum filters seem like the real deal. And to me you'd have been the perfect candidate to get one of em....
      Me? Except for the price tag. Maybe a couple years down the road. I've drooled over them and looked at them at the time I decided to get the Ultra seive. Bit by bit.

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      Quote Originally Posted by Roddy Conrad View Post
      I stopped using salt because water exchanges run across my lawn killing the grass when I have used salt in the pond.
      No lawn here. It's New Mexico. Glad for the day we moved here and never had to mow again. Haha. However, we water the garden with the pond water so.....

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      LoriP is offline Senior Member
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      I CAN SEE THE BOTTOM OF MY POND!

      All the babies present and accounted for and some of those little guys have grown like weeds!

      Beautiful clear water. Might not qualify as gin clear but moving the needle

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      kevin32 is offline Inactivated
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      That is awesome. Just watch for ammonia or nitrite. It could spike some

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