San Francisco Bay Area getting Chloramine next week

i add water conditioner to the water as i am filling up my tank with my python - no probs here!

It is pretty hard to over dose the chloramine remover so I would add it to the tank first then add the tap water with the python.

Quick! Time to buy stock in Amquel's parent company!

Jim

I am very new here and really need your expert advice. I am another person who lives in the SF Bay area and is now dealing with chloramine. I have had these tanks going for about 5 years with no problem all this time. I tried to get ready for it and bought two products: Amquel + = The bottle says it removes chlorine, chloramine, nitrate, nitrite and amonica. the other is Aquasafe=this bottle says it neutralizes chlorine, cloramine and heavy metals. Which one should I use???? Does anyone have any experience with either one of these products?

I have no idea what I am doing and figured I would start out small. Either add one of these products during the next time I need to add water to one of the aquariums.

Does anyone know how to calculate how many gallons a tank holds?? I will be dealing with 4 pretty big tanks and a round pond outside.

Thanks very much ahead of time for your help

Use the Amquel. If the other doesn’t specifically say something about ammonia, then the “neutralizing” probably means it only breaks the chloramines bond and does nothing for the ammonia that results from that broken bond. From what I recall reading here, Amquel or Seachem’s Prime are two products that also bind the ammonia. I am also preparing myself for the change to chloramines in our water next year.

Here is a great page on different water conditioners and what they do or do not do.
http://www.thetropicaltank.co.uk/rev-cond.htm


Edit... about your question on tank capacity:
http://www.worldfishlink.com/calculate.htm

thanks Kveeti, Wonderful links and info. Very helpful. Here's one more question. In the past, I have been using uniodize salt in the tanks for slime protection and to keep the bateria count down (There are water turtles in the tanks as well) If I start using a de- chloraminator/aminio -ator etc, what will happen with the salt have been using? Will it turn it into a poison? should I just stop using it? Do I need to use another chemical now to take it's place ? I hope not In 5 years, I have this down to a science for the tanks and the pond outside.

I am one of those purists that doesn't like dealling with alot of chemicals, don't know how to test the water, don't know where to get or how to use a test kit. Would probably kill all of my animal & plant life by trying.

thanks again for all of your valuable help

No Worries

I want to know why people are so afraid of the the word chemical. Water is a chemical. Table salt is a chemical. The world is made up of chemicals. They are mostly our friends!

But I live in the SF Bay Area, in a county that has been using chloramine for over 15 years. It's no big deal for most freshwater fish.

The toxicity of ammonia is determined by the pH. The higher the pH the more toxic it becomes. Around pH of 7, ammonia is mostly in a NH4 non-toxic form. Most freshwater hobbyists should actually be more concerned about nitrite than ammonia.

And this is why marine hobbyists (or freshwater hobbyists with water that is near pH 8 or higher) should be concerned more with ammonia than nitrites. Ammonia at these higher pH levels is in the NH3 toxic form.

I remember when my county first started using chloramine more than 15 years ago. One of my local fish stores (LFS) suffered a huge loss of saltwater fish, but all their freshwater fish remained alive and well.

And for those who don't want to use chemicals to rid the water of chloramine, here is a little fact that might help. Although people do say that chloramine does not "out gas" when aerated, this is not correct. It can be aerated out. It just takes longer. I've tried it several times. While regular chlorine takes days to aerate out, chloramine takes about 2 weeks.

And I don't use any special de-chlorinator on my tanks. I use simple sodium thiosulfate (hypo) sold at my LFS as Genesis. One drop per gallon. It's cheap and it does the job. Since the pH of my tanks is at about 6.8, I don't even worry about the ammonia because it is in its non-toxic form.

Paloma91, Kordon has great information about their water conditioners (Amquel & Amquel+) available online here .

They say you can go ahead & put the conditioner in your tank or pond right before you add the new water as long as you have reasonably good aeration (the conditioning reactions use some oxygen and might bring you down too far if your oxygen level is borderline). Adding salt at the same time is no problem.

I use Amquel+ at higher than the recommended dose, as my water comes out of the tap with ammonia=2ppm before I even break the chloramine so I titrate the Amquel+ to get it down to ammonia=0.25ppm (best I can do). I tried buying spring water but the first jug I opened tested out at nitrates=40ppm, so I decided I was better off conditioning the tap water!

I would definitely want to test that tap water after your water company starts adding chloramine; if you don't want to do it yourself you could take a sample in to your LFS & ask them to do it for you.