filter seeding

[koiczar]

I agree. Remember, a lot of dealers (not all) are "in it to win it" and the main thing on their minds is profit margin. The price of pond products is highly inflated and dealers would go out of business if they only sold koi. Where would your repeat business go??

[MikeM]

Dick: I've seeded a filter with mature media and it seemed to help speed things along. It is a matter of how much. 100% mature media would do the trick, I think.

I'm not sure why folks spend money on bottled bacteria to start-up a system. Most reports indicate no quicker result. I have gotten virtually immediate nitrification with a little puddle pond for guppies by using the residues caught in mats/sponges of an active filter and pouring the dirty brown water into the filter material of the new pond... I would not use the sediments settling in the mechanical portion of a filter, but have used the fine reddish-brown sediment to be found in the biological portion of a filter using mat or sponge media.

[kiky]

Thank you everyone. From now on I better spend my money on something else. But it's funny that almost all new ponds in my area always use expensive 'bottled bacteria' to start up new media. Using old matured media is almost unheard of these days. Maybe it's a result of KHV, which have destroyed big numbers of koi several times in the past 5 years or so.

[monscine]

Hi Everyone,

To an experience of my friend, the filter could be accelerated to be matured by what Rich L. said that is adding some amount of pure ammonia to our pond and filter system. He did that just twice for a week period, then he jumped the kois into the pond and everything just going its way. The logical is that the bacteria needs ammonia to be consumed, the cycling process is working and the bacteria colony grow up.

This way is quite cheap and effective way to prepare the filtering system cycle process.

Cheers,

[Rich L]

Just be certain not to add too much ammonia. I told a friend how to get it started and it didn't work. Turns out he added some ammonia each day until he saw the nitrite spike drop.

The ammonia shouldn't be replaced until the nitrite spike drops off. I had him take a nitrite reading and it was off his chart. I had him dilute it and it was still too high to read. The fourth dilution got it down to a readable level. The nitrites were killing the bacteria we were trying to colonise.