BAWM of ammonia- important in fishless cycling?
 

I hope I explain this right... I was asking my dad about ammonia for fishlessly cycling my tank last night. We own a blueprint shop and use ammonia for the machines, so I was wondering if our ammonia would be suitable for my ammonia source in fishless cycling. He explained to me that ammonia has different levels of ammonia (I guess versus water?), and it's measured by the "BAWM". I looked up BAWM (not sure if that's supposed to be in caps or if it's an actual word...) on dictionary.com and found "baume`" in reference to a measure of the density of liquids- named after a French scientist. So anyway, I'm pretty sure dad spelt it out "bawm" when he was explaining, but I'm not sure what it stands for or if it's a word.

So he went on to say the ammonia we buy has a BAWM of about 26- which is very high compared to household ammonia (the kind you guys recommend) which has a BAWM of about 14. But by the time we're done with our ammonia and can no longer use it, it has a BAWM of around 14, the same as household ammonia. The only thing is the BAWM will vary with each of our bottles of ammonia, and there's no way to tell exactly what the BAWM is when we're done using it at the shop.

So my question is... Does the BAWM matter? Does slightly stronger/weaker ammonia make a difference?

$5 bets you all tell me to just go buy ammonia 'cause it's cheap. ;) But I had to ask!! Dad said he'll also talk to the alchemist who sells the ammonia and see what he knows. :)

I would imagine you could use it, its just you won't need to add as much of it since its much more concentrated.

You're my hero. :D

The best way to figure out how much ammonia to add is through a add and check method. Add a few drops of the ammonia you get, test the water and record the ammonia levels (i.e 5 drops = 3ppm). Record the amount of ammonia added to your tank to get 5ppm and add that same amount each day.

As long as the ammonia has no perfumes or other additives you shouldnt have a problem with concentration.