Green-water

What is the best way to grow green water? I used to live in the city and the city water turned green automatically after a few days in the sun but my new place has a well the water does not seem to support unicellular algae at all. The water is very soft when run through the water softener and full of hydrogen sulfide, with out the softener the water is full of god knows what but it is even less likely to go green, it mostly turns red after being clear initially, the red settles out leaving a thick bed of red mud and the water is still very bad for fish or anything else. I am getting ready to set up at least one 300 gallon pool i want to grow daphnia in and using this water to grow them is a necessity. I think the soft water has more potential but I'm really not sure.

I can think of a couple of possibilities: 1) your water is too nutrient poor to support green water organisms; 2) you don't have any of the organisms present. So I suggest you lightly fertilize your water, and find a starter supply of green water.

Check with your old H2O dept and I bet you'll find they used an orthophosphate based sequestering agent. Liquid fertilizer. Purple slime in marine aquariums is horrid in some towns for that reason. Hair algae in FW.

Your well water is rich in iron, much of which is dissolved in the H2O. When you pump it up and spill it into a container, the Fe oxidizes and goes out of solution and settles as red mud. If that was your onlu problem you'd be golden. Pour off the supernate and dump the mud, you'd be good to go.
If you've got hydrogen sulfide, your needing better, different filtration - for fish purposes, not human consumption.

Softeners really suck for fish keepers but they're usually there for a reason.

I haven't set up the 300 gallon kiddie swimming pool yet but I did find that the daphnia cultures i do have going benefited greatly from a large water change. I drained about 75% of both my 75 gallon tank and my 125 gallon daphnia tanks and filled them up with new soft water the populations exploded again. the liquid phosphate you mentioned, is it available anywhere or do i have to be a water treatment plant?

Edited by Moontanman, 23 April 2010 - 12:55 PM.

Add 1/2 to 1 cup lawn fertlizer, like 10-10-10, dissolve in a 5g bucket of water. Put in sun for 7-14 days. Algae grows best when temps are 80F-90F, in full sun. Try that.

Other people simply add a handful of chicken manure, but you need nutrients in the water, like nitrates. Other people throw in leaves of lettuce. As it rots, green algae grows.

I've noticed that in my outside pools and barrels, as temperatures regularly reach 94F, the green algae is quickly dying off. I even added fertlizer to one kiddie pool, but that didn't work at all. I might add more ferts to that pool. Oh yeah, on hot days (around 90F) the water temp actually reaches 102F. I have no idea how that happens in a light blue pool in full sun. Water is about 5 inches deep.

Edited by bulrush, 07 July 2010 - 11:52 AM.

Oh yeah, on hot days (around 90F) the water temp actually reaches 102F. I have no idea how that happens in a light blue pool in full sun. Water is about 5 inches deep.

Water is a very unusual substance. It's got hydrogen bonds, and an extremely high value of specific heat. You can think of specific heat as "heat capacity", or capacity to store heat energy. According to wikipedia, "Water has the second highest molar specific heat capacity of any known substance, after ammonia." What that means is, it take a very large amount of energy to vaporize water, to change it from liquid to gas form. And it takes a very large amount of energy, relative to other substances, to cool water down. Water is capable of holding a lot of heat.

Anyway, science talk aside, what that means for you in practical terms is that water acts differently than air does. It can hold more of the sun's energy than air can. At noon, when your outside air gets up into the 90's before dissipating its heat off to colder objects, a pool of water in full sun is capable of retaining even more heat, and can get a higher maximum temperature than air can. Then the water retains that heat late into the afternoon and early evening. The water experiences temperature changes slower than air does, and retains heat longer. That's why, in the morning, when the atmosphere is getting warmer, pools of water remain really cold for a few more hours.

I could be wrong, of course. I'm not an expert in chemistry. But that explanation does kind of make sense.

My anonymous penguin loving friend would like to add that, "the reason it gets so hot is that it is difficult for the water to pass off its energy to anything else. its a LOT denser than air, so it takes far more air to contain that energy and the bottom of the pool (sounds like plastic from the post) makes it difficult to transfer heat into the soil."

Edited by Okiimiru, 21 August 2010 - 01:50 PM.