Using rainwater

[racoll]

Do birds and fish have common detrimental bacteria or parasites?

No*. I was thinking more about the effect of the bacteria on the BOD.

*birds are a vector for some fish parasites (e.g. Euhaplorchis californiensis).

[dw1305]

Hi all,
I know all the details are in the thread that "MChambers" & Viktor kindly linked <http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... in#p245009>, but both the "2 butt-system", (described below):

This is one of the reasons for having 2 water butts linked together with a tap, you can drain and clean the butt linked to the diverter, without losing all of your water. The second butt, from which you draw the water, always remains free of organic debris.

I also think that gutter/downpipe with a diverter will be much cleaner than one without, instead of all the sparrows nests, moss, lichen, leaves etc. ending up in the down-pipe, blocking the soak-away and/or sewer, they are trapped by the diverter, and need to be removed to ensure that water flows into the water butt.

Because of this requirement for cleaning the diverter, I ensure that I can remove it, whilst leaving the rest of the down pipe in place.

and the "Daphnia bioassay" are an extremely good technique for ensuring that your rain-water is aquarium safe. "Daphnia Bioassay" is a horrible technical term, but the procedure itself couldn't be more simple.

• 1. You add some Daphnia to your water butt when you set it up.
  2. When you draw the water off for water changes, you check that it has some swimming Daphnia in it.
  3. Swimming Daphnia = safe water.

That is all you have to do, the Daphnia do everything else for you. The only slight problem is that Daphnia magna doesn't do very well in acid water, but other similar water fleas do. In the UK the very large "Daphnia" (Simocephalus vetulus), is common in less base rich situations, and you only need low amounts of hardness to keep D. magna happy.

Daphnia Bioassay details: <http://ria.ua.pt/bitstream/10773/5040/1 ... 89_403.pdf>

cheers Darrel