no i did not dechlorinate the water,but i made sure the temperatures matched before releasing the fish,filtration will be a big problem for us unless its non electric
Tap water is what killed the fish. Tap water has chlorine and that's very dangerous to fish and it will kill the fish quickly. You need to buy de-chlorinator and put it in the pond that you filled with tap water before you can put the fish in.
IF you do not have filtration, you need to have ALOT of plants, and i mean plants like hornworth or those plants that they called oxygen plant. It can help a bit.
You will need something to move the water, air bubble will do. I know they sell solar air bubble thing.
The idea of filter is that fish, especially goldfish create a lot of waste and they live in their own waste. The waste consisted of Ammonia. To get rid of ammonia, you can do water change often if you dont have any filtration.
In Nature, there is this bacteria (nature is the best,isnt it?) that eats (I dont know really what they do) ammonia, but after they eat the ammonia they create Nitrite, which is also toxin to fish. Then there is this another bacteria that eats Nitrite but then create Nitrate (which is toxin in LARGE amount, but fish can live with it and plants use it to grow).
If you leave it to nature, this process happen in every pond naturally, it takes at least about 8 weeks for the whole thing to complete though, so mean while, your fish will be living in ammonia rich water, that's why water change come in handy (dont scrub any surface in the pond or you will kill the bacteria). This bacteria live on any surface, the more surface area you have, the more you have them.
