DShelton
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Posts posted by DShelton
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5 hours ago, Eric R said:
I thought that this was an interesting table that shows the relationship between the amount of hydrogen and hydroxide ions in water and its pH. [Source]
Yup, pH is defined as the -log[H3O+] , and there is another value called pOH which is calculated the same way for [OH-] concentration. pH + pOH = 14 for any given solution.
the [] represent concentration in mol/L, and if you notice when looking at the chart, as [H3O+] goes up, the [OH-] goes down by the same amount. These equations are the basis for buffered solutions, but that is quite the rabbit hole. I could make another thread if anyone is actually interested.
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47 minutes ago, Emika_B said:
Just to add another layer - substrate may also be a factor in KH readings. Some are called ‘buffering’ substrate. For a while I was doing everything I could to bump my KH from 1 degree to at least 4 - removed drift wood, added aragonite, etc. I got maybe 2 degrees more KH and it’s held steady at 3-4. My pH has held steady at 8.2. I’m using Fluval Stratum as a substrate and was told it may be the reason I’m not getting any real increase in KH. *shrug* I’ve stopped chasing KH but do keep an eye on my parameters and how my fish are behaving.
The active (Dennerle, Fluva, ADA, etc.) soils will definitely affect pH. My experience with stratum starting with pH 8.2 tap water, 7 dKH, and 161 ppm TDS, the pH was pulled down to to ~6.4. They were mostly engineered for Caradina shrimp.
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The pH swing in that tank is likely due to injected CO2. Achieving the target concentration of CO2 usually results in a swing of pH of between 1 and 1.5 units, depending on dKH.
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I would limit feeding. and continue to watch the tank. With 0 ammonia, and some nitrite in the tank, your cycle is progressing and the tank is getting closer. Your plants will help with all of the waste nitrogen (NH3, NO2, and NO3), so as long as you see ammonia at 0 from the test kit, but the nitrite is toxic when approaching 2 - 2.5 ppm. If that value is not going down, then it has to be managed by water changes (there is another way to do it, but it is not generally friendly to plants), and keeping the nitrite concentration ~1 (enough nitrite to feed the cycle, but not enough to be toxic to the fish). Nitrite affects oxygen uptake, so keeping the tank oxygenated is even more important than normal.
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If your other tank inhabitants will allow, Ember tetras are flashy in color, school well, and live in the middle to top of the water column.
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8 minutes ago, Jeff said:
It's about to be my Pink Flamingo Crypt that I just ordered tonight. I couldn't believe it was available, when I was scrolling the site.
@Cory mentioned on the Sunday livestream that they had some more on the way.
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12 minutes ago, gardenman said:
Not to go totally off-topic, but Poly-Filter has been around for decades and supposedly removes ammonia from the water. Many wholesalers include chunks of it in the fish they ship to protect the fish from ammonia in the shipping process. I'm assuming there's simply a sprayed on coating of some sort on a foam matrix that then gets released in the water. Perhaps whatever they use as a coating is also what Prime uses? It's fairly expensive stuff and wholesalers aren't noted for wasting money on stuff that doesn't work. You see quite a few fish shipped with chunks of Poly-Filter though.
I do not think it is really off-topic at all. Personally I have never used the poly filters, but based on their website, it looks like they work both mechanically, and chemically a little bit like activated carbon, and zeolite work.
Their FAQ specifically mention that the pads cannot be recharged, and that they are NOT ion-exchange resins, but based on what they say they 'eliminate' (not just NH3, but some metal ions, proteins, VOC's) (and they have lots of cited references), it has to be some sort of absorption substrate.
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7 minutes ago, tonyjuliano said:
So, if one uses the Seachem products to manage ammonia, you have to rely on another of their products to confirm?
Thanks for the info, but for me this is just confirmation of my reluctance to use chemical water conditioners of any kind.
I’ll keep in using my preferred “natural” methods. Water changes, RODI water when necessary, zeolite, etc.
I’m also fortunate that I don’t even have to de-chlorinate my tap water, no chlorine or chloramines in my public supply. (I live in central New Jersey and our public utility draws its water from deep well aquifers).
That said, our water is on the alkaline side (usually 7.8 pH), but I’ve found that almost all the freshwater fish that I keep can acclimate, so I don’t play the pH alteration game.
I’ve been keeping fish for many years, and only had to deal with a serious ammonia spike one time (a result of my own neglect, a long time ago) and water changes and zeolite took care of it.
I have a some Walstadt method tanks that run without a filter or heater, require a water change like one or two times a year, and just keep on going perfectly.
Lately, I’ve been considering setting up a “high-tech” affair, with fancy “soil”, lighting and CO2, but just because I’m curious.
Haha, In my original post, I gave a disclaimer. I have no hate for Seachem and some of the products are really solid, the ammonia alert thingy happens to be one of them. I have used them for years in both fresh and saltwater. I am sure there are other products out there to detect free ammonia in water, but the little Seachem one works, and is cheap, so why change? In the event that it changes color, then I can investigate and figure out what is going on.
Everywhere I have ever lived has had deplorable water, so I have always used RO or distilled/deionized water for almost all of my aquariums with rare exception. I do keep some water treatments on hand for emergencies when I have to, or do use tap, and prime works well for that.
Somewhere in a box in the garage I have a worn out copy of the 1st edition of Diana Walstad's book. Her approach to aquarium keeping speak for themselves. I have kept indoor 'Walstad' tanks in the past, and am going to experiment with one outdoors this summer for pond plants and some native fishes.
Hi-tech (or high energy as George Farmer calls it) can be fun. I have had CO2 injected tanks with EI dosing in the past, but did not have access to a high PAR (energy) light, and relied on natural sunlight. It became pretty tedious TBH.
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15 minutes ago, Medkow74 said:
I don't see why he wouldn't. To me it doesn't seem he trying to hide anything.
He even states that he kept all of his expirements very easy to replicate at home if someone was skeptical of his conclusions.
Yup, I am not critical of his experimental methods, or suggesting he is hiding anything, and I agree one should be able to reproduce most of his results at home with a minimal amount of effort and cost. My only 'criticism', if you want to see it that way, is in some places his writing style comes across as antagonistic. It is not that way to me, but I understand how it could seem that way to someone new to the hobby or with less understanding of the chemistry. I posted a note to him (the only contact method I saw) asking if he had copies of the Raman spectroscopy that I could look at since I do not have access to a spectrometer, and that would definitively put to bed the argument of what is and is not in the product since the SDS (I am old, and the MSDS format is better) is not very forthcoming. I would also like to read some of the published papers that he references, but doea not cite.
All good my friend.
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I think this math is correct:
current * voltage = power
Assuming a 20000 mA Hr battery pack running at 5V. That is 20 A Hr or 100Watt Hr.
100 W Hour / .333W (the pump wattage on the website), the pump should run for ~300 hours
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I was thinking the same thing as @Fish Folk. Looking at the COOP website, the nano pump uses 1/3 of a watt.
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3 minutes ago, RockMongler said:
Yeah, bottle #2 of the API ammonia test kit is sodium hydroxide
right on, i got my bottles backwards. I looked at those msds also, just fipped them around. The salicylate/ferricyanide/indicator is in the first one. cheers!
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Just now, tonyjuliano said:
So, this raises an interesting question...
How does one then test for continued ammonia presence?
Do other test methods demonstrate the same anomaly?
If not, which one?
Is a test for free ammonia. They suction cup in your tank (I stick it in the portion of the tank behind my matten filters and have been using them for 20+ years) and continuously monitor. They do have a lifetime and have to be replaced every three or four months.
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34 minutes ago, RockMongler said:
I'd be a much happier person if I knew exactly what was in it, so I could better know the chemistry going on. But I use API Stress Coat as my regular dechlorinator, and it has the same mystery box of what they use for dechlorination, but now with Aloe Vera.
I do just that. When I need to dechlorinate water, I use reagent grade sodium thiosulphate to do so.
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1 hour ago, tonyjuliano said:
They claim that the API kit raises pH in the test sample to a level that a false positive for ammonia is generated.
This is absolutely true. On the API website for their ammonia test kit, the mention the test kit uses the salicylate method.
Ammonia reacts with salicylate and hypochlorite ions in the presence of ferricyanide ions to form the salicylic acid analog of indophenol blue (Reardon and others, 1966; Patton and Crouch, 1977; Harfmann and Crouch, 1989). The resulting color is directly proportional to the concentration of ammonia present.
The second solution of the API test kit is sodium hydroxide and sodium hypochlorite (their MSDS shows this). The hydroxide raises the pH enough that the ammonia/ammonium equilibrium is driven 100% free ammonia. The hypochlorite is part of the second solution as a reagent for the ferricyanide/salicylate solution 1 to react with the free ammonia in the presence of the indicator to give the color for comparison.
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31 minutes ago, CT_ said:
NH4 + is also one proton different so I find it plausible that NH2- is also not toxic to fish. My understanding came from a best guess during a water cooler conversation from a chemist I work with filtered through my thick skull, which is why I'm skeptical of my beliefs.
agreed on the difference of one proton, I have never heard of NH2- as an ion stable in water. There is an aminyl radical which is NH2 with an unpaired electron, but that has no possible way of surviving in aqueous solution. The same would be true for NH2-
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11 minutes ago, Solidus1833 said:
Also I have a query for you. Hikary mentions their water conditioner has: electrolytes, buffers and a proprietary, polymer formula in aqueous solution.
Electrolytes=sodium dithionite, or sodium thiosuphate?
Buffers?
polymer formula?
aqueous solution=sterile H2O?
Could you possibly elaborate on these ingredients?
A polymer formula is the most interesting here of the ingredient list. Is there a liquid polymer that 'could' actually remove ammonia like Hikari claims?
Electrolytes could be anything dissolved in water that produces ions (charged particles). The dithionite and thiosulphate (thiosulfate is the American spelling, I had a British professor as an undergrad and the habit stuck) are definitely electrolytes in that they are ions in solution, but they are the reducing agents in the dechlorinators. I.E. they are doing the heavy lifting on the chlorine.
A buffer is a solution that is a mixture of a weak acid and a salt of that weak acid. They can be mixed in specific ratios in water to produce solutions of a specific pH.
The polymer formula could be anything there are tons of polymers (i have seen some as ingredients in my contact lens saline solution). I will go check out the MSDS for the Hikari product and see if it has some insight.
and aqueous just means a solution (homogenous mixture) in water.
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2 minutes ago, CT_ said:
Yeah :/. across the whole website there's a lot of cool experiments the guy does but he doesn't add enough information to know exactly what he did or what his results were, just what his conclusions were. He also has a section defending his writing by saying that academic papers are equally vague (not true IMO, though that's subjective I guess) and not reproducable. There is a "reproducabillity crisis" across science right now, especially cancer research (medicine is especially hard, so I don't blame anyone) but academic papers usually still have enough methods that target audience can infer most of what was done.
I am familiar with the website, and while I do agree with a lot of his science, I wish he was not quite so antagonistic, and would provide the citations for what he is referencing. I have asked him for some of it. Hopefully he will share it.
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4 minutes ago, CT_ said:
I was under the, very possibly mistaken, impression that whatever hydrosulfite salts they have in there took NH3 -> NH2-, at least temporarily, which lowered the total NH3 , NH4+ (ph of course keeping that ratio fixed). Is that plausible?
NH3 ---> NH2- just strips a proton from the ammonia. I would like to see that chemistry to understand it. At first thought I do not think the reducing environment in prime would be able to do that. I would have to do some more research.
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1 minute ago, Solidus1833 said:
hank you for this writeup. It makes a lot of sense. So in my example, really Prime did nothing, and my plants just did what plants do? I never saw any gill burn or stress on the fish because the 'real' level was well below toxic?
spot on!
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43 minutes ago, RockMongler said:
Do you have a list of all the ingredients in Seachem Prime? I'd love to see a list of them.
I too would love to see a list of them. I have seen a document from Seachem that has some of them: bisulfites and hydrosulfites, aqueous solution, buffered at pH 8, which absolutely in line with the chemistry.
43 minutes ago, RockMongler said:I suspect they have buffering agents in there, which can help keep the pH in a place where ammonia stays ammonium, and therefore, less harmful to fish. That alone would, at least to a layman, "detoxify" the ammonia long enough for our BB to do its job. Most also probably have an acid like ETDA that helps with unwanted metals in the water column.
They are definitely buffered to slightly basic pH. Enough to keep the dithionite/thiosulphate stable in the bottle.
I do not dispute your claim that EDTA will chelate metals in aqueous solution, but that does not affect the ammonia chemistry.
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Let me preface this in two ways:
- I have no axe to grind with Seachem, they make some fine products, many of which I buy and use. I do have an issue with their marketing on some products, especially prime.
- I am a degreed chemist.
I think everyone can agree that most municipal water supplies in the US will contain either 'chlorine' or chloramine, and those two chemical species are bad for fish and inverts.
When gaseous Cl2 is added to water, it reacts with the water like shown in the following two equilibria:Cl2 + H2O <---> HCIO + H+ + Cl−
HClO + H20 <----> H3O+ + ClO-
Reduction is the chemical process by which the dechlorinators work. They 'reduce' the chlorine species (CLO-) that are in water (as an anti-bacterial agent) to the harmless Cl-, and as the ClO- is consumed, both of the above equilibria are driven to the right.
The two most common active ingredients in most commercial dechlorinators is either sodium dithionite, or sodium thiosuphate. The chemistry is below:
thiosulphate is one of the products of the decomposition of dithionite in water, so whether your dechlorinator starts with dithionite or thiosulphate, the chemistry is the same.
sodium dithionite thiosulphate
2 Na2S2O4 + H2O ---> Na2S2O3 + 2 H2SO3
The thiosulphate reacts with hypochlorite in water:
Na2S2O3 + 4 NaClO + H2O ---> H2SO4 + Na2SO4 + 4 NaCl
2 H2SO3 + 4 NaClO + H2O ---> 3 H2SO4 + 4 NaCl
I think you will recognize that final component of both of those equations as common salt, but the key thing here is it has been 'reduced', i.e. its oxidation state has changed from being positive (in the hypochlorite ion) to being negative in the chloride ion. This is what I mean when i say they contain reducing agents. They cause a chemical reduction (gaining electrons).
Now the second half of the chemistry, and the part which is marketing garbage, relates to its ability to 'detoxify' ammonia. In an aqueous solution (i.e. water) gaseous ammonia exists in the following equilibrium:
NH3 + H2O <------> NH4+ + OH
That particular equilibrium is pH and temperature dependent, but the key thing here:
- gaseous ammonia is toxic at ~.5 ppm total concentration.
- NH4+ is also toxic, but at much much much higher concentrations (dependant on pH)
- all of the titration based test kits (API, sera, etc) measure that concentration as a total, i.e. NH3 and NH4 together, so the test kits are not giving you the big picture. (The Seachem ammonia alert measures free ammonia. It is the one that hangs in the tank and is a good product since it is free ammonia)
What is actually happening in almost all aquaria is:
In just about all aquaria with a pH < ~8.5 or so (which is a huge number of them; here in N. Texas my tap ranges from 8.0 to 8.2) most of the ammonia (NH3) will exist as ammonium (NH4+). Free ammonia gas, actual NH3, is toxic at ~.5ppm.
A variety of factors (pH and temperature) will affect how much of the NH4 is free NH3 in solution, but in aquarium conditions, it is safe to approximate between .1 and 1% of total as NH3. In other words, your .25ppm "ammonia" as shown by the test kit, at your pH is less than 1% of that as free ammonia.
So in other words, the prime is not 'detoxifying' the ammonia. There is just not enough ammonia in the water for it to be toxic. Using the example that @Solidus1833gave of 2ppm total ammonia in their tap water. The actual amount of free ammonia was between: .02 and .2ppm which is not toxic. The prime did nothing.
The only way to truly make the ammonia safe is for it to be oxidized from NH3 ---> NO2- ----> NO3- and to my knowledge there is no aquarium safe chemistry to do this, beyond the Nitrosomas and Nitrobacter doing so through the nitrogen cycle.
EDIT: I am sure there are some typos, I was typing furiously to get it posted.
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We really should take this out of @mgudykathread.
Fish Suggestions for a 29 Gallon
in Introductions & Greetings
Posted
These are really personal choices, but ember tetras are one of my favorites of the tetras (along with Lemons). I would add some Corydorus sp. and Apistogramma. I have next to zero experience with the Asian fishes (except snakeheads) so I cannot comment on the gourami. Hopefully someone else will comment.