Water Gardening: My first Lotus ever & Chloramines &fish, 1 by DRH2

DRH2 wrote:
Doss, I've got my lotus in a plastic, 7-gallon pot in the water garden. In the space of one season it will fill the pot with roots and tubers and has to be subdivided in the spring. I use a solid pot so that I can add fertilizer pellets in the bottom of the pot throughout the summer without the nutrients going out into the pond. This sits in a shallow part of the pond with only about an inch of water over the pot.

As to your choloramine issue. Since you have your system on autofill I think it would be a bit awkward to set up a chemical dosing system to add something such as ChlorAmX to destroy the chloramines. I have a system that I use that you might be able to adapt to yours. I use a water timer (since the autofill doesn't completely shutoff like it should and it was easier to put one of those battery operated units right in line) to feed the water into a whole-house activated carbon filter. From the filter the water feeds into the skimmer and the pumps where it is pumped through the biofilters prior to being dumped into the pond. The rate of water flowing into the skimmer is just a trickle - less than 1/2 a gallon per minute - and it usually takes a couple of hours to add a 1/2 inch or so. But the filter breaks down the chloramines (I change it out every two years) and any resulting products are diluted in the skimmer plus they pass through the biofilter which takes care of any ammonia that's released. Result is nothing going into the pond that would bother the fish or the plants. It's not clear in your photo whether you have or plan to have a biofiter but this approach is one option. As you probably know, aeration won't do much of anything for getting rid of chloramines.