So I went and bought a bigger aquarium and the pet store in my town, the only pet store outside of Walmart sells Brand X kits for $149, no empty tanks. They do NOT sell Brand X replacement filters. For pumps and filters they sell Y. I talked to the manager and wanted to know what their major malfunction was, and she just shrugged like I was insane. She didn't understand what my problem was. So I said, it was fine, I just want to buy an empty tank and she said I should try Rudy's.
I had never heard of Rudys and she told me where it was, and lo and behold it is a locally owned pet shop in my tiny little town that I had never heard of. I went down there and almost tripped over a rubbermaid stock tank full of koi! I said, "You have Koi?" And the guy said, "Yeah, got a lot of ponders coming in here all the time." So I said, what is your expertise level with koi, and he said he was not an expert, but he did have a 2000g pond.
I thought I died and went to heaven. We talked for about 30 minutes and basically it was verbatim the threads we've had here. You've got too much ammonia. No that's ok. Ahh, too much nitrite. Nope. Not enough O2, do you have a waterfall? Of course I do. Yeah, your water temperature is too high. 68 degrees. Must be some sort of toxin in the water. Yeah, maybe, how do I tell that? He had no idea. he did mention pond cycling and said my pond should get cloudy at some point, that hasn't happened yet.
So not super useful today, but he did have some weird aquarium test kits so I bought those. They only test PH and Ammonia, but I ran both tests and both were perfect. Zero ammonia, the PH showed a little lower than my other 2 tests, 7.5 versus 8.0.
Oh, and the koi he had for sale looked pretty questionable, but it might be an avenue I can sell my extra koi to once they start spawning. Either way, I'm just glad there is someone I can talk to face to face, there is no koi club here and I only know 1 other person with koi, but don't know him that well so don't talk to him too much.
