Moving House & Taking Your Goldfish & Koi With You

The obvious and immediate consideration is what to do with your fish on the day of your moving house. Most people will arrange for their fish to be kept in someone else's pond but this can be bad for both parties and should be avoided if at all possible. Here's are the things you need to plan for ...

1. Stop feeding fish one week before the time arrives to empty pond. This means that your fish are creating minimum amounts of ammonia. Your fish will not starve not even remotely.

2. Get as large a temporary pond on site (an above ground kiddies' vinyl swimming pool could be a possibility) as you can. You can even use pond liner within some kind of rigid holder like a large wooden crate ... it does not matter if the holding pond does not look pretty.

3. Clean out the new holding pond using pond water (not tap water).

4. This is important ... Arrange to buy, borrow or hire as large an air pump as you can with a mechanism for distributing the air such as air stones. If your fish start stressing without this kind of oxygen source you'll struggle to keep them alive

5. On the day you plan to empty the main pond arrange to pump as much pond water as possible pond water into the temporary pond and start pumping air into the water.

6. Do not overfill the pond since fish when stressed tend to jump and you do not want them jumping out of the pond ... many prize specimen fish have been lost this way.

7. Vital point here ... If the fish are to remain in this new albeit temporary pond home for a while then make sure about 50% of the water is replaced every day with fresh water .... 2 changes of 25% are better than a single change of 50%. Remember there is no biofilter so toxic ammonia and nitrites if present will build up. This is why you stopped feeding to minimise chances of toxic build up.

8. Keep a close watch on the fish ... any signs of unusual behaviour then change portion of water immediately and make sure the air pump is working

9. People with serious koi collections may well decide to have an ammonia remover like Amquel available ... just in case.

10. On refilling the main pond it would be a good idea to add a chlorine removing agent to the fresh tap water and in any case rather spray the water into the pond .. this will help the chlorine to evaporate

11. Take advantage when refilling the pond to measure your pond volume