Quote from above: Doc, Thanks for dropping in. HAving struggled to keep stable water, I installed a 4 tray 5foot shower system fed by a 12K litre/hr pump. Since then, I have managed to stabilised water quality. Someone said that degassing cannot happen if the water is a shower and not trickled. What is your take on this? Roddy: I find shower filters are even more effective than normal trickle towers, and have run 20 separate shower filter experiments of my own to collect and understand their construction and scientific basis. The shower filters dependably cycle for me in 10 days or less for ammonia and nitrite, the cycle time for nitrate is highly variable experiment to experiment.

Quote from above: Another observation I made. During the last 2 weeks, the sun has been extremely strong and weather is dry. I had a sudden "string" algae bloom. Even stopping feeding didnt help and the water was starting to turn green. I decided to increase aeration with 5 airstones powered by a 40 watt hiblow and dumped a liter of boottled bacteria. Two days later, the water is clear.

Question is; Did the strong sunlight and temperature cause the algae bloom. Roddy: When I have an algae bloom when using shower or trickle tower filters, in my own case I have always traced the cause to high phosphates in my city source water. The city engineers here in Charleston, West Virginia, USA, routinely add phosphorus compounds to both kill mussels and to protect metal pipes from rusting. So my source water runs typically 5 to 30 ppm phosphate, a very high level. When the biofilters of algae has consumed the phosphates, the algae goes away, in my case. But this is very situation dependent, the cause of your algae issues may be quite different. In my situation, if I do a large water change with my city source water, I can expect an algae bloom from the high phosphates. So instead of doing water changes, I instead regenerate the water with potassium permanganate. Those practices are quite controversial, compared to the subject of trickle tower and shower filters, which almost everyone agrees are a very good way to filter pond water. So to answer your question truthfully, I don't know exactly what cured the algae problem in the situation you describe. To know for sure would require a bunch of water quality measurements that most folks are not equipped to collect. Meaning extremely accurate measurements of ammonia, nitrate, and phosphate levels. And maybe a few other parameters depending on the situation.