Water conditions

Nusema

AC Members
Sep 9, 2004
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Hurley, MS
My water naturally has heavy metals in it, by that I mean a lot. After the water is treated with Aquasafe and other chlorine removes( two seperate times) the water develops a film or greasy/oil coat at the very top of the water. Why is this? Couldit be from the outrageous amounts of heavy metals?
 
Could be. Some water conditioners claim to remove heavy metals. The only way that I can see of doing this in a safe way would be to chelate (key-late) them. A chelate is a big organic molecule that grabs metal atoms.

The cheapest way to remove this would be to have an activated carbon insert handy. Add it to your filter (or better yet, have a spare filter, like an AC-mini) after you do your water change and leave it there for a day. You may want to run a line of tubing from the intake and use this to manually "vacuum" the surface. Remember that you'll need to stay below the water surface for this to be effective. Don't leave the carbon/spare filter in all week, if you do so, the carbon will soon expire.

A more costly way is to get a surface skimmer. I think that these can be diy'ed, might be worth looking into.
 
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