Make Water vs. Using Long Island Sound for Hatchery
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From an institution in Connecticut:
In our current facility we make ocean or brackish water using Instant Ocean. But we only use it to maintain aquaria, not for experimentation. As we are designing our new lab we are considering how we deal with water and if we can use LIS water rather than make it. It occurred to me that you have encountered this issue in your hatchery and maybe in other ways. Would you be able to share with us your water process?
GreenWave Response:
Below is an outline of our water's journey from sea to tank!
- Obtain seawater from a wet lab that goes through a sand filter before we load it onto our truck in our IBCs
- Pump water out of IBCs and through 20 then 5 micron cartridge filters before being stored in our 1000 gallon storage tank.
- When we want to fill our culture tanks, the water is pulled from the storage tanks and gets its final dose of filtration through a hollow fiber filter. We have been told this filters to 0.05 microns.
We recommend for other hatcheries to have filtration go down to at least 0.5 microns, and ideally 0.2 microns. I do recommend using a longer chain of cartridge filters if you are using more water. Perhaps going 30, 20, 5, 1, 0.5 microns. This will reduce clogging and make your filters last longer. UV sterilization is a common way to give water one last treatment before it reaches its final destination, which we will be adding to our system this year. It will kill organisms in the water as the water passes by the UV light.
Take a look at the Seawater & Water Storage and Water Filtration sections for more GreenWave guidance.
A protein skimmer with ozone injection at the beginning of the water treatment system is a good strategy for bulk removal of biological material and lightens the load on the mechanical and UV filtration downstream.