January update

A brief update one what’s been going on recently.


After the summer, I continued to heat the females tank – all the way until the beginning of December when I started to reduce the temperature slowly; hitting ambient temperatures just before the end of the month. Ambient temperatures during December much warmer than normal and the ambient tanks in the polytunnel were holding at 12 C at that time.


Temps have taken a dive mid Jan, and the ambient tanks are sitting around 5C.


The heated growing on system has been ticking along fine in the low 20’s C until last week, when the air temperature went very low for a week and the tanks dropped to 17 C. I leave the tanks uncovered which is great for observing the fish, but when the air temps stay sub zero day and night – the heaters can’t input enough heat into the system to hold the temps as I’d like and that’s the compromise.


The other issue I’ve had is that the fan blades have broken on my air source heat pump; and this may have been holding back the heater from delivering the full amount of heating that it’s capable of. Plus, the machine started to vibrate so violently when the unbalanced fan blades were spinning that I was worried it would damage the connections to the pipes and perhaps cause a catastrophic leak.


you can see pieces of the fan blade that have broken off and are laying in the base of the unit.


I have another heat pump of the same size, sitting on the females tank – and currently unused. So, I took the covers off both heat pumps and swapped the un-damaged fan blades onto the heat pump connected to the growing on system; and that did the trick. Took me 2 hours though!


I kept all the screws removed safely in a pot, and after putting both air source heat pumps back together – I ended up with 3 spare screws. It’s always the way…


I’m long overdue catching up all the tosai growing on, and having a good sort through them. And, I have a few talks coming up at koi clubs next month so will try and get some pics of the tosai this weekend for the blog, and for some up to date material for the talks.


Wont be long now before we start preparing for the 2016 breeding season…