My water temperatures are back to wobbling between 10-12 C, and the fish are eating the occasional bundle of leafy greens but definitely Not Interested in pellets. We're coming up to a run of nights with predicted lows of -4 and -5 C, so hopefully the days are sunny enough to boost temperatures back up!
My hoop house is still keeping things above freezing, no matter how cold it gets outside (yaaaay~!), so I'm still getting tomatoes! The cherry tomatoes are doing best; the large ones are still ripening, but so slowly that most of them are starting to rot on the vine. I've pruned them back hard and am going to pick all the future ones green. I could sit them on the window sill to ripen, but somehow I suspect that I am going to be forced, forced I tell you, to make more green tomato chutney. ;)
And now we come to the (hopefully amusing) saga of my Wednesday morning!
On Tuesday, I cleaned out my radial flow filter, and I must have bumped one of the pipes out of alignment because when I went out to check on things early Wednesday morning, it was leaking. Not just the very slow occasional drip that I've resigned myself to it doing; it was dribbling a steady stream from around one of the uniseals, and I couldn't get it to stop. I poked at it a bit, and decided that I'm going to have to empty the whole thing, take it apart, and re-do all the pipe connections through it using something more secure. (Which reminds me, I need to get online and order two 50mm tank outlets, oops.) In the meantime, though, I couldn't just leave it there dribbling! The leak was fast enough that I was pretty sure I was already going to need to top up the water (when I checked later, yup). So, the obvious answer was to connect the outlet from the fish tank directly to the sump tank, which means that after I fix the filter I'm going to need to clean out the sump. Oh well. Fishies aren't eating much so they're not pooing much either.
I turned off the pump to the fish tank, took the internal piping out of the filter to make things drain faster, waited for the water to stop flowing, and used a siphon to partially drain the filter. Then I took off the pipe that runs from the filter to the sump tank, checked to make sure that it was the right length and angle to reach from the fish tank to the sump, started to remove the pipe that goes from the fish tank to the filter, had a little difficulty, decided that if I got the other end off the filter it would be easier to undo the end from the fish tank, popped that loose...
...SPLOOOOOOSHHHH~!!!!!!!!
There was still about 100 litres of water in the filter. And because I'd taken the internal piping out of it, there was nothing stopping it coming straight out of the connector I'd just undone. So I was standing there, holding a length of pipe (I was right, it did come off the fish tank once I had the other end loose :P ), soggy from the knees down and laughing like a loon as Lake Hoop House spread out around me. XD
