Goldfish bowl

W bought me (as an early birthday present), not quite a year ago, an Affinity Pillar.  It's a sort of "glorified" goldfish bowl, with a waterfall feature, an underwater light, and baskets for water plants on the side.  We have 4 goldfish in it.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of months it has been losing water faster than it should.  We were not going to make a fuss, but clearly needed to do something to sort it.  I contacted the makers, to try to source a new liner.  They quite spontaneously accepted responsibility - technically the pool is within guarantee time, but if they had questioned, we would have admitted that it was possible we had damaged the liner when moving the pool (to allow the house painter access to the wall behind).  Unfortunately, they no longer make the Pillar shape, and have no liners.  They offered us a choice of other pools as a replacement, and we chose the half moon shape, only for it to turn out that they have none in stock, and do not expect to have any before October.  We don't fancy the rectangular ones, and the octagonal one is too big, so we have no choice but to wait for the half moon one.

Until a couple of days ago, the leak was slow, and we just kept topping up with rainwater from the water butts, but over the last couple of days, the leak has increased.  About a week ago, I topped it up to a level just above the top of the windows.  W gave it another 2 buckets of water yesterday, but despite that, the level is now below the bottom of the windows.  We are about to go away for 10 days, and would not like to come back to find the poor fish stranded in the bottom of a dry bowl.  So we will move them into a temporary home - W has retrieved a (currently) unused water butt, and brought it up to the patio.  We need to go fishing, and move them, either tomorrow evening if the weather is OK, or on Friday morning.

We may move them back when we get back from holiday, though the rate of water loss is getting silly.

In other news, our new router has arrived, but I still can't access the internet from my desktop computer - I've ordered a wireless dongle this evening.  And we had a tremendous storm today - apparently there was a good 2cm water on the patio, and W was expecting Noah to come visiting.  There was a brief power outage - so I will need to adjust my clock when I go to bed shortly.