Is dechlorinator necessary?

[Ruben Miranda]

Hello
Cost wise you are not going to lose that much money buying and using declor it is just not that expensive.
But you could lose a lot more by not using it and not testing.

Guessing that it will be gone in 2 days or 4 days or a week just do's not make sense.
If you are wrong and you do have clor in there and you put fish in there is a good chance it will harm the fish.
For sure it will kill the Beneficial Bacteria if you have any, But for sure it will not grow if you have chlorine it the pond.

The best advise is do not guess
Test and test again and treat before adding life.

Ruben

 

[gardengimp]

I have bought feeder goldfish for my pond. But, there are several factors working in my favor when I do this. If you want, hunt up my QT'ing Baby Fish topic (which I need to update).

A few key points:

- personally selected store based on fish keeper
- selected Petsmart
- specifically get fish on the afternoon of delivery
- specifically pick healthy looking fish

I DO QUARANTINE them! And I do average a small percentage of loss.

I also have to say, if I could chose between taking somebodies excess pond spawn over feeders from the petstore; pond spawn any day any time.

 

[HTH]

The problem is this. There are enough people saying feeders and ok and enough people saying no need to QT when you add the first fish (or maybe never). Some newbie reading threads will see a mass of people say it is OK. So they go out and get whatever feeder fish and not QT.

For this reason and for our own benefit we should try to stick with and promote Best Practices.