i am thinking to buy a 300 gallon barrel 6 feet tall for age water and place it in my backyard away from power outlet due to space. so I am wondering if I fill up the tank and age it for 2 days w/o air stone or power head, is it ok? or there is somthing that i can consider?
Letting it sit stagnant may promote bacterial growth. Outdoors possible mosquito larvae or other microorganisms. Birds etc. unless you have a tight cover but then gas off won't be as good. Are you going to pump it into the house? If you are just circulate the water with the pump.
Properly aged water is detoxified, aerated and heated to the proper temp before being put into aquaria.
People who have well water don't need to detoxify, and people whose treated municipal water only has chlorine can detoxify with sodium thiosulfate or just strong aeration over a few days' time. Those of us whose municipal water has chloramines need to use prime, safe or similar.
Aeration creates the proper concentration and balance of dissolved gasses in the water, stabilizes PH in the process.
Having the temp within a few degrees of tank temp is also very important. Doing that outdoors is more expensive and challenging, even in fairly warm climates.
So we need to plan on doing all 3 to make aging water worthwhile at all.
Nice container. It looks a lot like the 265 I squeezed into a small corner in my basement fish room. As jhhnn said heating can be an issue. I'm sure SOCal is way warmer than MI. I use the pump to circulate my water and have it coming out the bottom drain and back in the top. It drops down on the surface with quite a force. I tried aeration but the air pump would not get to that depth. It looks like an awesome tank if you can keep it warm and circulating. The other issue is supply.
I got it set up with powerhead. Recently it's kinda warm here in socal, somehow the water is cloudy. Is that because of heat? Would anyone give me any ideas? I appreciate it.