Search the Community

My Southern California water is hard, high-pH, and contains high quantities of chloramines. I have 13 tanks at last count. That's a lot of buckets to dechlorinate on water change day! About a year ago, I took the plunge and researched what it would take to pre-filter my tap water so that I could refill tanks directly, I'm really glad I did, because in the long run, it has saved me more hours than I can count! Thankfully, it's a lot easier than it might seem. Below I will walk through the steps the average household can take to set it up, to show how easy and effective it really is! Plan on a $100 total expense. (All links are non-affiliate) (I have ripped off illustrative pics from the internet. He had it coming.) (Apologies to our overseas friends; this is how I did it in the U.S.) I'm assuming you know how to connect push-fit quick-connectors: Push, then pull, then insert a blue clip. PARTS: 1. 2 x Clear filter housings for 10" x 2.5" filters: 1/4" ports ($28) (clear is useful to see how dirty the sediment filter is) 2. Sediment Filter Cartridge: 1 micron ($7) (you could get 5 micron, but at this cost, why?) 3. Chloramine Carbon Block Cartridge: 1 micron ($20) (this cartridge is overkill if you're only treating for chlorine) 4. RO Canister Wrench ($7) (must-have for opening/tightening canisters) 5. Threaded fittings for RO canister housings: 1/4" ($7) (this is a basic selection; you can get more fancy here: elbow, direct connection, etc.) 6. Water supply RO adapter ($11) (basic is generally fine) 7. 25'-50' of 1/4" RO hose ($9) (how much do you need to reach your tanks?) 8. Assorted RO hose fittings ($12) (buy them all; you'll use more than you think!) 9. Vaseline or silicone grease 10. Teflon tape. STEP 1: Tap into the Cold Water Supply Pick a room with running water. I used my kitchen sink because of its proximity to big tanks, but bathroom or laundry hookups will do. Right where the cold water supply feeds the faucet, you can easily install the adapter valve. To install, simply: 1. Place a towel under the cold water shut-off valve. 2. Turn off the cold water valve. 3. Disconnect the hose to the faucet. 4. Install the adapter (use teflon tape for the threads!). 5. Close the new adapter's valve. 6. Reattach the faucet hose. 7. Turn the water valve back on! Here's a not-very-helpful picture of my installation. I have a RO-drinking water unit, so I had a similar adapter already installed: I do not worry about water temperature when refilling my tanks. I can't prove it, but I've heard that a quick blast of cold water simulates a rainfall and can stimulate breeding and other behaviors. Otherwise I will lose gallons of water trying to get the mix just right every time. Maybe if I had a fish room, but for 13 tanks, cold water alone is just fine. I change 50% in every tank every weekend. STEP 2: Load the Canisters Each of the filter canisters has a black o-ring in its housing. You'll want to gently pry it out, coat it with some vaseline or silicone grease, and push it back in. You can then load the filter cartridges in each one and screw the housings into the lids. Use the wrench to tighten them. STEP 3: Connect the Filter Canister Tops An RO threaded fitting needs to be screwed in both ports on each of the two canisters. You must use teflon tape or you'll have leaks! Once closed up, you can use some RO tubing to connect them to your home water supply adapter. Take note of the "IN" and "OUT" markings on the lids. Run a short length of tubing from the new adapter on your plumbing to the "IN" port of the canister with the sediment filter. Then, run a very short tube from the "OUT" of that same canister to the "IN" of the canister with the carbon block. The remainder of your tubing can be attached to the "OUT" port of that second canister, and will hopefully reach your tanks. Be sure and put a ball valve (you bought several) on the end of the tubing to your tanks, so that you'll be able to turn it on and off at that point! STEP 4: Check for Leaks I had to do this several times until I had used enough teflon tape or vaseline grease on the o-rings. It's worth paying attention at this stage to save yourself grief later! I closed the valve on the very end of my tubing, and opened up all the others. I keep it in this state indefinitely. STEP 5: Flush out the Carbon Powder I ran my unit for about an hour into the sink, until the water came out with the lowest TDS and clarity. STEP 6: TEST! I have a chlorine test kit that measures total and free chlorine; this allows me to infer chloramine quantities when I compare with an ammonia test. None of this is necessary, in my opinion, except maybe for peace of mind. I found that water coming out of this unit tests at zero for chlorine, chloramine, and ammonia. I suppose maybe the ammonia could read as much as 0.25 ppm, but it's my opinion that it's not enough to hurt fish, and any bio filter will snap that up right away. STEP 7: USE IT! I keep all the valves open at all times, except for the one on the very end of the hose that goes in the tanks to refill. The water coming out of this unit is not high pressure; it runs about 1 gallon per minute for me. I prefer that. Now, I just uncoil my hose to any part of the house I need, and coil it back up under the cabinet when I'm done! Clean water from the tap! STEP 8: ADDITIONAL TIPS 1. You can drink it too. 🙂 Unless you're already drinking RO water, it's MUCH better filtered than that stuff that comes out of your fridge icemaker or Brita filter. 2. The hose is so small I can put a tiny hole in my wall and get it to a tank for a permanent installation: Think auto-water changing! 3. You can add stages to improve the filtering capabilities. For example: A 5 micron sediment filter before the 1 micron will increase the lifespan of the latter. I haven't needed this; at seven bucks I plan to change it once a year whether it needs it or not. If you just want to take care of chlorine and not chloramines, you can go for a less restrictive carbon filter, which will boost your water pressure. For more neutral water and low-pH applications, you can add an RO membrane or DI resin. And so on. 4. For filling my rack, I went nuts: Hope this has been helpful. Thanks for reading! Bill

I was at my local fish store today, and the employee there was non stop trashing Seachem Prime (which was one of the things I was in there to pick up today). I guess they have permission to white label BrightWell Aquatics Erase-CL, and sell it as their own product with their own label. She said the only reason they still carry Prime is because customers always ask for it, but this product is much better. So I bought some of the miracle juice, and I am here to ask your experiences with it. Everything I have been told about the hobby is that Prime is "the" best product. The employee said Prime is good for first starting a cycle but after that it's not useful, and that it has a bunch of unnecessary stuff in it. I've looked for ingredients for both products and it seems both just say it's a proprietary blend. It's got great reviews online, so if you have experience with this product please give me your input.

I was reading a few things based on some advice I received here over the last week or so after issues in my tank. I was under the impression you add Prime based on how much new water you're adding to the tank after your water change. Example, I take 20g out, so I dose 2mL for that 20g, even though my tank is 55g. That is what I have been doing all along. Two articles I read said you dose for how many gallons are in your entire tank, not just what you're replacing. So off I go to look at the bottle of Prime. Directions are as follow: When I do my water changes I use a Python, the water goes right into the tank from the sink, so I add Prime right to my tank. Should I therefore be dosing for 55 gallons (my tank size) regardless of how much water I am changing/adding back in? I feel incredibly stupid for even asking this, but I really want to make sure I am doing this right.

Bad Gas Or How Long It Really Takes to Remove Chlorine and Chloramine After seeing @Odd Duck 's ingenious 'pre-mixing' rig that he created for automatically pre-mixing the dechlorinator for water changes, I thought about this data I've had for some time about chemical-free degassing. Though it was more useful 30 years ago than now! But hopefully some may still find it interesting. In the 1970s, I had 5 small marine tanks. Mixing salt and minerals in a bucket. I used to degass the water by simply waiting for 2-3 days. Others I knew set up a reservoir tank outside to allow the sun to assist and used it in 24 hours. A few years into it, a local pharmacist turned me on to Sodium Thiosulfate and sold me bottles of it to dechlorinate my fish tank water, making life substantially easier. With so many good dechlorinators available now, it seems dated to discuss this but for those of us old enough to remember degassing as the default dechlorination technique, it attaches some interesting numbers to dechlorination and perhaps some potential for automatic water changing setups. Most municipalities have their water parameters available online. You can check the chemical and mineral content in publicly available reports such as this one from LA County: LA County Water Quality and Content Most will use Chlorine + chloramine. Here in greater Los Angeles, the Chlorine + chloramine content is as high as 4PPM (the federal limit), which would be fatal to most fish. Both Chlorine and chloramine can be most quickly negated by boiling but that is rarely a practical approach! Aeration and agitation will accelerate this and while VERY effective on chlorine, it's still rather impractical for chloramine. However, UV light can GREATLY accelerate the breakdown and dissipation of both Chlorine and chloramine though, sometimes to its own detriment. In LA, with its 300+ sunny days a year, many public swimming pools are covered in part to prevent the UV from degrading the disinfecting action of the Chlorine/chloramine as the UV breaks it down within hours. Most use an additive, cyanuric acid to prevent UV light from breaking down Chlorine in pools. The addition of chloramine to Chlorine treatment by municipal water supplies is well thought out though. Partly gas, partly solid, but both are timed to continue their disinfection almost seamlessly over the life cycle of the two. This is the decay of the Chlorine + chloramine in a 29-gallon, rectangular, open top tank at 80* and PH=8. If you look at the red line, it is the normal water with no agitation nor treatment. Notice the slow decay of disinfectant level. At Hour 24, the Chlorine has actually dissipated (shown as a barely perceivable dip encircled on the red curve around Hour 24) but the chloramine maintains the level, almost perfectly linearly, as if it was just added at Hour 24. It slowly degasses, each hour about the same amount, until Hour 180 upon which it reads 0. That's some quality engineering. It's also a very long time to get rid of Chlorine! Notice the green line. The same exact rig but with aeration. Just mild aeration and it drops from 180 hours to 70 hours. Better. But still too long... Then the interesting one. The blue line represents the same setup again, with aeration plus a commonly available UV light sterilizer for fish tanks. This UV sterilizer had a 13w bulb and an output of about 200GPH. The UV added so much photochemical energy, it was completely devoid of both Chlorine and chloramine in under 6 hours! But next is the kind of thing that gets me excited (although I'm easily amused)! Notice the small, red circle on each of the curves. That encircles the "knee" of each curve. That 'knee' is where the Chlorine has been exhausted but the chloramine is still very much active. With aeration alone, the chlorine is gone in 6 hours, but the chloramine needs 70 hours to be removed. But look at the red circle on the blue curve. The UV light completely removed the chlorine in only 2 hours and totally removed the chloramine in 6 hours! Even fa$ter? UV dechlorination can be sped up with much stronger UV light. The UV sterilizer mentioned above is a “low pressure” lamp whereas high output dechlorination lamps are known as “medium pressure”. Should you have an extra $700 lying around, this UV light can be a conditional alternative to ROI, if your water’s mineral composition is desirable, at a reasonable size and cost: Mighty Pure UV Water Purifiers 3–20 GPM NSF - BuyUltraviolet By passing your faucet through this device, it will remove 100% of the Chlorine, chloramine and all microbes with UV light, without changing another single aspect of the water, all in a single pass (but the GPH depends on cost). This one disinfects at a rate of 180GPH, but it would need to run at about 1/10th the disinfection rate to dechlorinate as well, making the output about 15-20GPH. The more reasonably priced ones may be of value for automatic water changers if ROI isn't required or the lost minerals ROI removes are actually desired. No membranes nor filters will ever clog, no microbes will pass, and all the minerals will be retained, (if the latter is actually a good thing). Every 10,000 hours of use you'll need a new bulb and an occasional cleaning. But spending about $2000 or much more enables some 200GPH or more of dechlorinated and disinfected water to exit and these come in as large a scale as one can imagine or afford. These are industrial in size but are industry standards for chemical-free dechlorination and disinfection: UV Dechlorination, Chemical-Free These industrial UV dechlorinators are used in breweries and laboratories for extremely high purity water systems where no amount of Chlorine or especially, the inert byproducts of chemical dechlorinization may remain in the water. With this device, it is your water with no disinfectants or microbes at any flow rate you wish, all else unchanged. Personally, I just use Prime! If there's a reason to degass without using a dechlorinator, admittedly I don't actually know what that would be but perhaps others may. Nonetheless, I thought some might find the data interesting!

When setting up a tank and tap water was just used. No fish are added for 2 weeks. Would a dechlorinator still be needed? Second part to the question, if the answer is yes, if there's fish already in the tank is it safe to use the dechlorinator? Thanks in advance, just asking since I asked my dad if he put dechlorinator when he set up his tank a month ago and he said no. Some of his fish died when he added them and some survived but my guess is that the tank wasn't cycled enough. But now I'm thinking it might of been due to lack of dechlorinator too to treat the water. Since he told me the first day he added the fish a lot of them was sucking air. My guess to that was the gills were burning. Again I'm totally new and got most of my info from watching YouTube vids and reading sites.

I’m starting this thread to continue a discussion from here because we were getting off topic from the original post, but I’m legitimately curious. I know a lot of people have had issues with using Prime, understanding what it actually does with ammonia, and how it affects their cycle, so I thought this might be a good thread to have around for reference. Some people think Seachem Prime can’t detoxify ammonia. It claims to detoxify ammonia, so I’m curious why some people think it can’t. Just remember we are NOT allowed to talk trash about other companies, so let’s keep this discussion focused on what Prime is doing in our aquariums.

Seachem Prime Water Conditioner,,,this is so concentrated Im not sure how much to add to 5 gal water change

Hi y’all when I was doing a water change and refilling it was around 7-8 pm I don’t remember the exact time last night when it was refilled. I started doing something else and when I went up to bed at around 10:15 I remembered I forgot to put dechlore in. I have a Congo puffer in there along with 3 panda garas. They all seem perfectly normAl the the same and happy. what I want to know is did I hurt my fish.

Hello All! I have been using Seachem Prime for about 20 years for treating water but recently switched to Seachem safe because I change a lot of water and have a lot of tanks. But I have been hearing from many people in my circle that Hikari Ultimate is the best, I was curious why it was the best and I was wondering what the best for chloramines were because my water is super high in chloramines.

Why does dechlorinator lower oxygen in a tank? I've heard this a lot and I don't get why. I tried to look up the reaction between sodium thiosulfate and chlorine and I found two reactions depending on if its cl2 or chlorite: Na2S2O3 + Cl2 + H2O → S + 2HCl + Na2SO4 Na2S2O3 + 4HOCl + H2O -----> 2NaHSO4 + 4HCl Neither of these seem to consume any O2. Is there an downstream reaction with one of the products?

I do weekly water changes to my 250litre tank. The way I do it is literally empty out 30% off water with a siphon, and then I fill up a 25 litre bucket with the dechlorinator and pour it in little by little with another bowl. this is very tedious but I’ve just done it like this without thinking too much as it’s worked fine for me. right now I’m getting busier and I’m finding it hard to carry out my weekly WC this way. for next time should I put the dechlorinator in once I’ve taken out the water and then just fill it directly with the siphon back in the tank? i don’t want to mess up my aquarium so any help with how I could make my water changes less tedious would be extremely appreciated. thanks!

I've stopped mixing equilibrium/alkaline base/acid base to get the ph where I want it with RO water and just started mixing in tap. 8.3 out of the faucet. I keep the RO in a bunch of gallon jugs and started keeping 2 gallons of tap water in jugs as well. I am adding either prime or stress coat to the tap to dechlorinate. I am wondering if I do this ahead of time a day or 2 if I can use just enough to treat the gallon and not the entire planned tank. Question is how long does it take for the prime to work?

Hi Everyone, I'm confused about Seachem Safe. The problem is: The dosage seems incredibly small. I've searched this forum and found that you may or may not be able to store Safe in a solution of water and use it like Prime. Some say yes, some say no. I'm worried about massively overdosing since 1/4 tsp treats 300 Gallons. I'd like dosage information on the order of "Sure you could use X amount and it wouldn't harm your fish - in my experience" . So I guess I'm asking for personal experience using Safe. Dosage for a 90 Gallon would be really helpful - or maybe I should just get a gram scale and be done with it. Thanks so much - hope this isn't too rambly!