Hi

Just tested my tapwater after letting it sit for 36 hours and found it reads .5 ppm for ammonia. What, if anything, can I do about that when changing water?

I know .5 isn't a lot, but I'm not very happy about adding ammonia when I change water, especially in the fry tank which is only 30 litres and has a simple sponge filter which may not process the added ammonia very quickly.

Thanks

Jan (Noodle)

I imagine this is because water company treats your tap water with chloramine rather than chlorine and this is what happens when it breaks down.

Try leaving a sample treated with your usual dechlorinator in the same way, and if it is one that treats chloramine, check but most do now, I would expect you to get a reading of 0 ammonia and all should be ok.

Thanks Cathie I'll try that.

Jan

Hmm, this is odd. Tested a sample of tapwater that I'd treated with Aquasafe after letting it sit for 36 hours and it's still showing Ammonia at .5 ppm.

My water supplier does use Chloramine, and the Aquasafe I have is the recently changed version that is supposed to treat this.

As the level is the same both treated and untreated I can only assume there is actual Ammonia in the water supply.

What would be the best way to deal with this, particularly in the smaller fry tank?

Jan

One solution would be to use Prime as your dechlorinator - although it's fiddly to measure for smaller tanks.

http://www.seachem.com/Products/product_pages/Prime.html

Thanks Cathy. It looks like Prime is the best way to go.

The only thing is, what will that mean in terms of testing the tank? I see Prime detoxifies the ammonia, rather than removing it so presumably there's little point in testing the tank water for ammonia when water changes are very frequent (i.e daily in the case of the fry tank)?

Jan

Hi Noodle

If you are doing daily water changes for the fry then you are probably safe. A lot of people use the Seachem Ammonia Alert though when dosing with Prime or Amquel + as it lets you see at a glance the toxic free ammonia (as opposed to the binded ammonia) especially when you are only doing weekly water changes on more mature tanks.

Ebay stocks lot's of them if you can't find in the shops http://shop.ebay.co.uk/i.html?rt=nc&L ... n=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m283

They do a good pH alert too. Mine normally lasts for about 6 months, then the 'test circle' starts to fade so you know when to renew it

Thanks Violet.

I'll probably invest in one of those. Funnily enough the first seller in the list on your link is one I added to my watch list earlier for Prime so I should be able to kill two birds with one stone there.

There are strange things happening with PH here too. It seems to vary rather a lot and is currently 8.2 from the tap (after sitting for 36 hours) and a tad lower in the main tank which has a large amount of bogwood. 8.2 from the tap is quite a bit more than Severn Trent report for my location though, so not sure what's happening there. I'm a tad concerned at the higher PH of fresh water going into the tank when doing partial changes as I'm having to change about a third twice a week at the moment due to the output from Herman the plec!

Jan

The cycling process in itself acidifies water a little but usually on those with soft water tanks can register it happening. Happens with mine.

Harder water tanks don't usually budge

It would be interesting to know the GH and KH readings. There have been posts before here on 'weird' water areas where although the pH is high even after 24 hours, a lower than expected KH reading was taken (you'd expect this to be higher too in high pH areas usually).

Carbonate hardness (KH) gives the main buffering capacity of the water meaning, the ability to resist pH swings. Could be what you are seeing? Interesting.....

Hi again Violet,

KH is 6 and GH is 11, in tapwater and in both tanks. PH is consistently 7.4 in the main tank and that figure is the same as the average for my area quoted by Severn Trent.

Testing the tapwater has given PH results ranging from 7.4 to 8.4 over the last week or so.

In the fry tank, with its small volume of water, PH is affected when I do a partial change and it usually closely mirrors the current tap PH.

In the main tank I've seen a rise in PH after a water change while the tap PH has been particularly high, but it resolves back to a typical 7.4 within 24 hours. However, due to frequency of water changes the PH is swinging around quite often and I'm a bit concerned about the possible effects on the fish.