Washing up liquid in pond.

[mbridgett]

Hi,

Our lovely 8 year old decided to see what happens when he emptied half a bottle of washing up liquid in our (10 foot) pond. Apart from the obvious bubbles, the side effect will be the imminent demise of everything in the pond, including all the fish. Unfortunately I am working away from home so there is very little I can do remotely and apart from running a bath of water which would probably kill the fish anyway, we have no other recourse. Unfortunately we only have one pond and have no neighbours with ponds either. I have therefore reluctantly decided I'll have to clean the pond and re-stock from scratch.

I guess what I am looking for (apart from sympathy) is any advice on how to actually clean the pond. I was debating just emptying/syphoning off as much as possible, then refilling and just leaving it for 6 months or so. By that stage I'll know if the wildlife is beginning to recover and live in the pond again. I am kind of assuming that after 6 months the washing up liquid remaining will have been washed out. However, I have no idea what the (effective) half-life of washing up liquid is.

Any advice on the best approach? Google really didn't help much for once!

thanks
Mark

[ron1863]

Hi Mark and welcome to WAB. I don't know much about ponds but I reckon you will have to drain the pond and thouroughly clean and rinse all traces of the washing up liquid away. I reckon a visit to a pond specialist would save time by getting advice on materials etc. Good Luck

[eeyore]

I wouldnt be too hasty - washing up liquid is only soap so it might not kill off all the pondlife anyway - and it ought to break down fairly quickly. The long term problem will be the increased nutrient load in the water (soaps have lots of phosphate) which could lead to eutrophication and deoxygenation - to combat that you could put in a miniture floating fountain to oxygenate the water (take the cost out of mr 8 year olds pocket money - hes old enough to know better).

regarding the fish - fish arent great in a wildlife pond anyway , so you could take this as an oportunity to go the no fish route.

[tom00_uk]

it will break down, but your in a catch 22 situation you will need to aid the life with more air, but with bubbles come bubbles of soap

cleaning solutions like this can be very toxic to aquatic life, hence why they now dont all ways use soaps when a oil slick happpens as more things were dieing from the soap than the oil

water conditon and tap water added and carry our many water changes, least the flowers will gain from this event, and in future avoid chemicals near children, no mater how harmless you think the chemicals are, there is a good chance they will kill wildlife

[Pippa]

Welcome to WAB

Soap isn't great for wild-life in general but i don't have a pond.

Hope all goes well for you.

[mbridgett]

I thought I should post an update as the OP.

Interestingly 4 fish died very quickly - within a couple of hours. What really suprised me was that 3 have actually survived.

So far I have seen frogs in the pond as well, so not everything has been wiped out (at least yet). I guess frogs can just breath in the air though, so maybe they aren't as affected as the fish.

We put a hose pipe into the pond to try to give as much fresh water as possible and dilute the washing up liquid.

I left the waterfall off for one day - tried it after 24 hours - and no bubbles!

If the other 3 do survive another few days I guess that will be a 50% mortality rate, which is a shame, but at least there are some survivors so far!

Thanks for everyones advice.

regards
Mark