How Weed Busters Kill Blanket Weed
A Scientists Explanation
The WEEDBUSTER is an electronic device which delivers a series of carefully selected low frequency signals to pond water through aerials wrapped around the circulation pipes. The effect of these signals is to cause Calcium Carbonate equilibrium in the water to become de-stabilised. The result is a surplus of free Calcium ions in the water. These ions are rapidly absorbed by all living cells in the pond, both animal and vegetable but BLANKET WEED (Spirogyra Adnate) because of its long thin tendrils and large surface area, absorbs more of them than anything else. The result is that the weed gradually dies off by over metabolising.
The WEEDBUSTER was developed from the Little Plumber Water Conditioner, which is widely used to remove limescale in boilers and plumbing. The WEEDBUSTER uses the same principle to remove calcium from the membranes that surround the cells of blanket weed to make them leaky. This disturbs their metabolism and inhibits their growth. If you want to know how it works, please read the notes below written by Dr Andrew Goldsworthy.
How Water Conditioners Work
The main effect of water conditioners is not so much on the water itself but on the impurities in it. Both tap and pond water normally contains very fine suspended particles of solid matter (called colloids). These usually have a negative electrical charge, which enable them to attract a coating of positively charged mineral ions (electrically charged atoms). They prefer ions with more than one charge, such as calcium (which has two) since they bind more firmly.
The WEEDBUSTER generate electromagnetic pulses that are of the right size frequency and shape to remove these strongly-charged calcium ions and allow them to be replaced by less highly charged materials. When the treatment is over, the particles re-attract their lost calcium over a period of time, which gives them the ability to remove calcium from elsewhere. Treated water reduces limescale since the particles act as nuclei for the crystallisation of calcium salts, which prevents it forming hard limescale on surfaces. They also attract calcium from limescale that has already formed in plumbing, which then becomes carried away in the water flowing through it.
Last but not least, they can attract calcium ions from the delicate membranes that surround living cells, which makes them more leaky and affects their metabolism. This is how the WEEDBUSTER works to control blanket weed.
How Water Conditioners Affect Blanket Weed
All living cells are surrounded by extremely thin membranes (only two molecules thick) made of proteins and lipids (oily molecules). They have many of the properties of an oil film floating on water and will automatically coalesce around an injury if damaged. This is partly because the oily molecules are more attracted to each other than they are to the surrounding water (oil and water don’t mix) and partly because the membrane contains calcium ions. These ions have two positive charges, which makes them adhere to more than one membrane molecule, most of which are negatively charged.
In this way, they help bind the whole structure together like the mortar that binds the bricks in a wall. Conditioned water probably works by removing some of these calcium ions (just like it removes calcium from limescale) and so weakens the membrane. Although it remains visibly intact because of the affinity of the oily molecules for one another, it will develop temporary holes (especially when the molecules are agitated at high temperatures) and become leaky.
But how do leaky membranes affect metabolism?
This is where we find another very important role for calcium. By a strange quirk of evolution, the concentration of free calcium ions inside living cells regulates the rate of many biochemical reactions; they proceed faster as the internal calcium concentration increases. Normally a cell keeps its internal concentration of calcium very low (about a thousand times less than outside) and increases it only when needed to stimulate metabolism. But conditioned water, by making the membranes more leaky, allows free calcium ions to leak in from the outside to cause an Blanket weed cells unscheduled increase in metabolism.
For this reason, mildly conditioned water has been found to stimulate the germination of seeds and fungal spores and increase the growth rate of many plants (yes it can even increase the growth of blanket weed), but if the water is very strongly conditioned the cells become so leaky that the calcium-based control mechanisms become overloaded, toxic materials can also leak in, the cells become stressed, growth is inhibited and many may die.
We therefore need strongly conditioned water to control blanket weed. It is very important to use a good quality water conditioner such as the WEEDBUSTER, which has been designed specifically to reduce blanket weed, follow the instructions carefully and use the correct size for your pond. If you don’t, you could find that the blanket weed grows better than ever!
What about the fish and other pond life?
Are they harmed? Probably not since most will be saved by their size. Blanket weed is made of filaments of tiny cells, all of which are in intimate contact with the pond water. Because they are small their surface area is large when compared to their volume, which means that a leaky membrane will have a relatively large effect on the internal calcium concentration. But fish and most pond plants are very large by comparison, most of their cells are not in contact with the water and even those which are have it only on one side, so the internal calcium concentration of a fish will not be much affected by conditioned water and there should be little effect on their metabolism.
Dr Goldsworthy is a scientist who has studied the biological effects of conditioned water on a wide range of organisms over many years at Imperial College London.
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