Quote:
Originally Posted by
paladin_k2 
I cannot say that I would approach the new pond start up and search for ammonia in the same way you are going about it.
The cycle has to go through the stages to get stable and there can be stressful spikes which can endanger your fish.
For each kilogram of fish food that you feed, the koi will produce somewhere between 35 and 45 grams of ammonia depending on the protein content of the food being fed. Most of the ammonia is excreted back into the pond within the period from 1 to 6 hours after feeding.
If you have a rough idea of the total weight of food you are feeding per day you can continue to monitor the feeding rate and the ambient ammonia/nitrite levels and try not to just keep dumping in food if you begin to see a spike.
Your pond volume at 14,000 gallons is equivalent to roughly 62,000 liters of water. Your ammonia test kit and nitrite test kit should both be giving you indications of toxicity concentrations in terms of milligrams per liter (mg/L). If you can keep any ammonia spikes from going above 0.25 mg/L in a new pond before the biofilter system drives everything back to zero within 24 hours then your should be able to keep your fish safe and happy.
Try measuring the ammonia level 4 hours after feeding when it should be at its peak.
Do a quick back of the napkin calculation to figure out how much weight of feed you are feeding and how many mg of ammonia this should be dumping into the system. If you are feeding 125 grams of low protein wheat germ based food per feeding then your koi should be generating about 4,375 mg of ammonia per feeding. In your pond volume with no removal or filtration going this would register as 4,375 / 62,000 = 0.07 mg/L of ammonia and that should not even really register on the typical test kit sensitivity of 0.25 mg/L on the first step. You would have to feed three of 4 times that amount with your filters turned totally off in order to get the test to register.
In my experience of establishing Bio-filtration capacity the Nitrite consuming bacteria is far more difficult and erratic to establish and maintain. I would make sure that I was running an adequate base salt level to help buffer the fish against acute nitrite toxicity spikes since salt is one of the easy things that can help prevent problems in the new pond cycle. A salt level of 2.5 to 3 pounds of salt per 100 gallons of pond water in the unplanted pond should be high enough to buffer any moderate Nitrite spike by placing you in approximately the 2.5 ppt salt range. For your pond volume of 14,000 gallons you would need a big ole bucket-o-salt to carry the 350 to 420 pounds needed to get on the salted water registery.
In the past two years my water has never registered off ZERO on the ammonia or nitrite tests either but in my case the filters have been running longer plus we have large planter reverse flow bogs that the water passes through before returning to the Koi zones.