BlagdonPond Water Treatment Ammonia & Chloramine Remover, Fast Acting, Safe for Fish, Wildlife & Pets, 500ml, Treats 4,546 Litres of Pond Water

If you are reading this review you are probably battling to save your beloved fish and I hugely sympathise. It’s awful and happens to the best of fish keepers at some time in their life despite all the best love, attention and care. For this reason I’m not apologising for the long post and I hope my experiences and explanation of this product and how to evaluate it’s effect will help you. This product really does work 100% and it is ideal to quickly rescue a really bad situation when your filtration fails and you get that dreaded damaging ammonia spike. But it will not repair any damage done so you must act quickly. I’m such a convert that I now keep enough of this stuff in the cupboard to treat my pond in an emergency just in case. Ammonia is deadly and can cause fatal damage so fast it’s frightening. Although brilliant, this product is however a short term fix that buys you some precious time while you sort out the underlying issue but it acts really quickly and effectively and if you’ve picked up the ammonia problem early it prevents that awful ammonia related damage that so often is fatal. I’ve used it twice in the past few years in my koi pond. First time around I didn’t know it existed and by the time I got hold of it the damage was done to my fish and although I’d sorted the water quality problem fairly quickly I still had to watch helplessly as some died off up toseveral weeks later. This time I picked up the spike really fast and had the stuff in the water immediately, I have jumbo koi and sterlet and although I was totally freaking out they all remained healthy and never showed any signs of stress thanks to the fast action of this product after a duck (10 to be precise) related filtration/pump clogging disaster that damaged my biological filter and was followed by a big ammonia spike. In fact the fish just seem annoyed I’m not feeding them and can’t understand why I’m stood there anxiously looking at them but there’s no dinner going in. First time around that this happened to me I was slow off the mark and did multiple water changes, bought sacks of zeolite etc but now I’m way more clued in and the ammonia remover was in the pond in a flash! Didn’t even need to do a single water change this time around despite persistent alarmingly high readings on the traditional test kits for a week after I detected it. At this point I should add that you’ll not see your ammonia levels reduce one iota unless you use the right test kit. My readings on the traditional kits were sky high all week but my fish were perfectly ok and behaving normally. This problem with not understanding testing may be one of the reasons why people are not ‘seeing’ positive results from this product and I don’t think this is clear in the product info, or I suppose it may be because the underlying issues are just not addressed fast enough and as a result they are seeing fish fatality like I did first time around. Fish produce ammonia all day, every day, it’s how they excrete their waste so if you don’t fix the underlying problem of managing ammonia levels in your pond it will just come straight back or get worse. Back to testing.... this is what I found out.Basically Ammonia in your pond exists in 2 forms and this varies according to acidity of the water and water temperature. So a sudden increase in alkalinity (think putting the hose pipe into a slightly acidic pond to top it up in hot weather) can flip it into a release of free ammonia. Ammonia favours the bound form in more acidic environments and the free form in more alkaline environments. Usually we keep koi at a pH of around 7.3 ish. This fluctuation in temp and pH is no problem if your filters are up to speed but any detectable amount of free ammonia is very, very bad news for your fish and is a real problem in summer as the free ammonia ratio becomes higher as the temperature rises. You are feeding heavily because they’re really active in the warm summer water, there is more evaporation and then you top up your pond and alter pH, and if you’re unlucky and your filtration stalls as well this just creates the perfect storm and you can get a whopping spike. Free ammonia is deadly to fish even in very small quantities and causes enough damage, even at fairly low levels over prolonged periods, to kill off your beloved fish in the following weeks (even if you’ve resolved the problem they can still die (heartbreakingly) from the effects weeks later) unless you act really quickly to prevent the damage from happening. This is where this fab product comes in. The bound form of ammonia is much less toxic. My understanding of this is that this product permanently binds the free ammonia into the much less toxic form that won’t re-convert back into the toxic form. The problem is that most ammonia testing kits work by detecting total ammonia and so you can’t see the ratio split between free and bound and so can’t see what’s really going on with your water chemistry. So unless you know this you think it’s not worked as the ammonia level reads the same!! Hence once you’ve used this product a regular test kit still shows the ammonia level as the same and unchanged because it is looking at total amount not the ratio of free and bound. I did a lot of research during my week of sleepless nights first time around and the SeaChem ammonia test kit is the only kit I found that measures both forms accurately so you can see what you are dealing with and more importantly if you’re winning and removing that dangerous free ammonia. It’s a bit fiddly but then so is fish keeping :) if you’re new to this and have sick fish due to an ammonia spike stop feeding immediately as this will just increase the levels, look at increasing aeration (ammonia reduces the blood’s ability to carry oxygen as well as destroying the gill’s ability to pick up oxygen from the water, hence they literally suffocate) and add biological filtration boosters to get to grips with the chemical filtration imbalance. I have read that adding pond salt also helps reduce resultant nitrite toxicity. (be careful about salt addition if you’ve used zeolites to remove ammonia or you may release ammonia back out again) Water changes help to reduce the levels of all these toxins by dilution until you can get the ammonia remover in but remember chlorine in tap water will kill off your filter so add a dechlorinator or you’ll just go round in circles and not get it sorted. This product says it binds harmful chloramines too. Bonus. Losing fish is soul destroying and heartbreaking. Good luck and I wish you well in restoring balance to your pond.

The product worked well and quickly.

I had an Ammonia spike due to overfeeding; this product helped me to balance the levels and save the fish.Great product.

We’ve had our pond for many years, regularly test the water, all of a sudden we had dangerously high amonia. Tried everything else, filter change, removing some water etc but it stayed high. Within a couple of hours of putting the prescribed amount in, we had a clear test! Fish seem happier, all good. Would recommend.

Very happy with the product and the results in my pond

Ammonia in my pond.

For a quick remedy to lower your ammonia levels it works, but it is not cheap.

I had what I thought was ammonia burns on my fish. So I bought an ammonia test kit and this treatment.I tested the water and the ammonia was a little high but not really too high. Certainly not high enough to cause fish issues.But I treated the pond and 2 hours later the ammonia level was halved after I tested it againWater temperature was about 12'c.