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26-08-2004, 09:52 PM

(Barb) wrote:
Andy Hill wrote in message . ..
(Barb) wrote:
We have a pond in our backyard in Tennessee. We have had it for four
years. We had twenty goldfish and 1 catfish in it. It had become
very green with algae so we decided to clean it. We bought a
container to put our fish in while we cleaned it. We put the fish,
their current pond water, and the water hyacinth in the holding
container. We then emptied the pond, power washed it, and refilled
it. We added chlorine remover after we filled it. We added the fish
back to the water. Then, my husband added some algae blocker (blue in
color) to the water after the fish were re-introduced to the pond.
The next morning, all the goldfish were dead. We are wondering what
went wrong. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

pH shock, temperature shock, poisoning from whatever cleaner you used for the
cleaning (assuming you didn't use straight water), ammonia poisoning (if your
water treatment is chloramine instead of straight chlorine. Probably other
possibilities -- it's almost always a bad idea to make "big" change to a fish's
environment.

Thanks for the response. FYI - we used straight water to clean the
liner. Where can I find instructions on how to properly clean a fish
pond?

Looks like others have answered the cleaning question. What I'm curious about
would be how you re-introduced the fish to the pond. While I'm not a fan of
the "big bang" pond cleaning method, it sounds like your approach should've
worked if the fish had been re-introduced gradually. By gradually, I mean much
like you'd introduce a new fish from the store -- float a bag holding the fish
(and its original water, of course) in the pond to allow the temperatures to
adjust, and, over a period of hours, introduce a bit of pond water into the
original water in order to match up the pH.