Chlorine, Chloramine Remover

[Oscar_Wild]

My wife bought some chlorine/chloramine remover for when I do water changes. I usually buy the one that also removes ammonia. I have a question regarding the chloramine and the fact that the stuff my wife bought does not do anything for the ammonia. When the chlorine/ammonia bond is broken, the stuff then removes the chlorine but what happens to the ammonia? Is there enough chloramine that the resultant ammonia would cause a problem if I do a 50% water change?

Thanks,

Oscar Wild

[JamisonBWolsh]

Whats the solution? AMQUEL? I use that.....

Chlorimine is a chemical added by the water company to better protect your tap water. It does not break down as fast as chlorine does, so it is much better for us humans. NOT FOR FISH. Chlorimines is the combination of Ammonia and Chlorine. Amquel (or product like it) Breaks the bond, takes care of the chlorine, and changes the Ammonia so it is not harmfull to the fish.

Most US water companies are changing over to this new system. Right now, most big cities uses it. In the future, the smaller cities will converge also. Im not sure about outside the States though.

If you dont have chlorimines in your water, you can still use this type of product. No harm done.

[Oscar_Wild]

My water does have chloramine, thus the question. Is there enough ammonia to cause problems?

[wetmanNY]

It depends on:

how many parts per million of residual chloramines were in your tapwater to begin with

how densely planted your aquarium is and how strongly your plants are growing

how effective your nitrification is

how your pH affects the freed ammonia, whether most of it is quickly ionized to non-toxic ammonium

how large a water change you've done

[JSchmidt]

Our water is treated with chloramines and usually registers 1 ppm ammonia max after treating the chlorine with a double dose of sodium thiosulfate. Most reports of ammonia levels I've read cite levels of 1 ppm or less, but on occasion someone has claimed a level of 2 - 3 ppm.

Let's assume your water has 1 ppm ammonia. If you do a 50% water change with that water your tank will initially register .5 ppm. If your water is high in pH, most/all of that ammonia will be in it's toxic form. If you have soft, low pH water (e.g., 6.0) most will be in the non-toxic ammonium form. (Obviously, if you do different percentage water changes, you can easily calculate the ammonia level following the water change.)

The question is, do you want to regularly expose your fish to that level of ammonia? In a fully cycled tank, that ammonia will be taken up rather quickly, but not instantly.

The conservative, cautious approach is to use Amquel or something similar to detoxify the ammonia and to dechlorinate the water. Unless you're doing frequent, large-scale water changes on multiple tanks, the cost differential between Amquel and other dechlorinators isn't that great.

HTH,
Jim