Gassing Off Cholramine

[Buckman]

So I recently found out that I have chloramine in my tap water. I think that explains the terrible first week I had. But right after that I fell into good habits with conditioning my water. I got a 5 gallon bucket, heater, nano sponge, and air pump. I would refill this bucket right after a water change and let it bubble for a week until I needed water again. Never had trouble.

Fast forward a bit to last week. It's winter. The house is cold. Keeping a top-off jug on the floor makes it too cold to just dump in the tank. So, for the first time I start getting getting top off water straight from the hot and cold tap mixed together to 79 degrees, adding Prime, and dumping it in. I know now that this wasn't enough time for Prime to work, and like many articles have said, Prime didn't even touch the ammonia and I had a couple of really bad days with this aquarium. I've about got it sorted out.

But...I need a new water conditioning process. And the problem is that the entire internet says I shouldn't be able to do what I am doing, which is pumping air into water with chloramines / ammonia and getting away with it.

However, I have also seen quite a few people claiming that this is exactly what they do. But for this, I haven't got much of an explanation. 

If I put Prime into tap water and test it immediately, there is about 0.5 ppm of ammonia. It is never much. The lowest amount to show up on a Co-Op ammonia strip test. So, it's not as bad as it could be. But it was bad enough to kill off a corydora, 10 ghost shrimp, and almost killed my mystery snails before I figured it out. The tank went through it for a minute.

My question is this. Why am I able to remove ammonia by injecting air in for about 24 hours? And it is about 24 hours. 8 was a no-go and 16 didn't work either. Needs a whole 24 and the airstone better be pumpin' it out. If I put a big plant in the bucket, it tests clean in about 4 hours. 

So what gives?

Does Prime really remove ammonia? I think the answer to that is no. Unless it also needs 24 hours of agitation with air to do it. Didn't see that on the bottle. I've never seen a bottle of Safe in this area and haven't gotten to look at it.

Has anyone here developed a workflow that gets rid of chloramines in this way?

[Schwack]

I think this: https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/5-5-3-2-prime-and-safe/ is a pretty good article on Prime and the claims made by Seachem. The "detoxifying" claims always sounded like marketing speak to me, and I don't rely on Prime for that purpose.

Are you certain your municipality uses chloramine? My understanding, limited as it is, tells me that chloramine isn't volatile enough to off gas, even with agitation.

I'm surprised you'd see such a dramatic effect from .5ppm ammonia. Could there have been something else going on during that water change? I've heard of people periodically seeing much more chlorine in their water than normal, probably the result of maintenance by their water supplier. Did you get a chance to check the water that went in during your die off?

My provider also uses chloramines and I just go straight in with a Python. Don't think I've ever had an issue immediately following a water change. https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/5-5-3-2-4-prime-safe-and-chloramine/ Might be a useful article to read through.

[Buckman]

Everything went to crap for about 3 days. Once I figured this out and started testing all water and only putting it in my tank if it was clear of ammonia, everything got better quick. Everyone is moving slower but recovering. That first time I dumped the top-off water it was a whole gallon into a 20 gallon tank. That's a 5% water change. I know people get away with worse, but I didn't. The fish didn't care that much (well not exactly, I lost a corydora) but the invertebrates took a beating. My water company proudly displays their chloramine usage on their website. To be honest, I don't think they use much of it. I have lived here for 20 years and no one ever mentioned it. But it did me some harm. Fish stores sell Prime by the bucket load and tell you the water is fine with 2 drops a gallon. They also said the water is on the hard side and great for shrimp. That first day just about all my shrimp died and I was doing 50% water changes. No wonder the first week of that tank looked rough.

[813aquatics]

I use tap treated with chloramine and treat with prime. For some of my tanks that water is ok to go pretty quickly, and I’ve never had any loss nor seen ammonia read over 0.25ppm. I let the water sit for my tanks that need a bit lower ph but haven’t ever had to worry about chloramine/chlorine once treated with prime. 

As for the ammoni detoxification, my understanding is that it temporarily (no longer than about 24hr) converts ammonia/nitrite to non-toxic/less-toxic forms that can be filtered out by your biomedia. It isn’t a permanent effect, so if your tank isn’t seasoned enough it may cause issues after a period of time. I say seasoned bc while your tank may be cycled you may not have a sufficient size colony of bacteria to handle major spikes.

I would be testing your tap water parameters daily and also let that water sit and compare tests over time. I don’t know if you mentioned how old your tank is or not but I would be surprised if prime is the point of failure because for the majority of people it works pretty flawlessly. If you are super suspicious of prime coop sells alternatives like fritz.

There are also a lot of different reasons shrimp could be dying off, be it hardness, ph, temp. If you could do tests and provide all of your parameters it may give a better idea of what’s going wrong. I think you’d be seeing a lot of drastic symptoms from your fish prior to them dying off if they were suffering from ammonia, but that is just my experience.

[Odd Duck]

I don’t think you’re gassing off the chloramine, I think you’ve got BB’s growing in your bucket.  You are gassing off your chlorine. This is exactly how I used to condition my water “way back in the day” before they started using chloramines.  Once the chlorine is gone, your BB’s are handling the trace of amine (ammonia) that’s left.  Unless you’re completely scrubbing your bucket between fillings you probably have a bit of slime on the inside of your bucket.  That’s your biofilm and your BB’s.  The risk of depending on that is if your water company does a shock treatment which most will do randomly with no notice.  Likely what got you in trouble.

It doesn’t take long for dechlorinators (most also neutralize chloramines) to work and some people add them directly to the tank then refill from the tap.  I’m paranoid and fill a rolling barrel with water and mix my dechlorinator in that for at least a few minutes before adding to any tank.  As long as you’ve mixed for a few minutes, you should be safe enough as long as your BB’s are developing into a healthy colony.

[Guppysnail]

As @Odd Duck says shock treatments are harsh. I run standard 2ppm chlorine from the tap but randomly when my water company does shock its 4ppm. I use safe for large water changes which is seachems dry powdered prime. One bottle treats an insane 60,000 gallons from one $12 bottle. It’s very economical vs the liquid conditioners and works the same and just as quick. It also binds the ammonia into ammonium (much safer form) for 24 hours so that your tanks filtration can consume the ammonia. Safe and prime also treat chloramine

Edited February 3, 2022 by Guppysnail

[Mmiller2001]

On 2/3/2022 at 5:00 AM, Guppysnail said:

As @Odd Duck says shock treatments are harsh. I run standard 2ppm chlorine from the tap but randomly when my water company does shock its 4ppm. I use safe for large water changes which is seachems dry powdered prime. One bottle treats an insane 60,000 gallons from one $12 bottle. It’s very economical vs the liquid conditioners and works the same and just as quick. It also binds the ammonia into ammonium (much safer form) for 24 hours so that your tanks filtration can consume the ammonia. Safe and prime also treat chloramine

How in the heck am I just finding out about Safe? 

You rock! Thank you!

[Buckman]

Yeah, I didn't put all the parameters down. O have been discussing this in another thread. Then when I figured it out I posted this separately.

And I have been talking about this all wrong. I keep talking about chloramines because that's the new thing I am dealing with. But what's really going on is I add Prime to tap water, this breaks apart chloramine and in my case leaves behind 0.5 ppm ammonia. This is actually what I am agitating our of the water. And that's a very small amount. If it was much more I might have larger issues.

So some places shock periodically? Or maybe when testing requires it? I haven't read that yet. I'll look into it though. 

I have lots of beneficial bacteria in this tank. There's several pounds of lava rock in the bottom and I run it in the HOB as well. Everything is testing well again. Seems like things are getting back to normal. I'll test everything obsessively for a while.

If any good came out of this it's that I now have a decent pH meter in regular usage. I have recently learned that many test strips are well off the mark here. I regularly get confirmed readings that are as much as 0.8 off from a strip test of the same sample. A test strip will show 6.7 or so and the pH meter says 7.5 right after calibration. That's just not working for me.

[Scott Stevenson]

Please understand that this is  not meant to be adversarial, just a good old fashion, ignorant question, but why would u go through the bother of "gassing off" ? I have always just added water straight from my tap and then added water conditioner and have never had a issue.(Granted I have only kept hardy fish).

[Buckman]

Well this kinda started in another thread. That's where I was trying to find out why a corydora, and well...now up to 10 shrimp died. And everybody looked sick. The snails tried to leave town, closed the back door and didn't move for days. Had one plant didn't like it either. Took a few days but I just through away a grey betta bulb. I did mention some fish loss in my second post. 

So my water company uses chloramine (which is not the same thing as chlorine, it's got ammonia attached.) You got a problem if you leave it (chloramines kill fish) and you got a problem if you use a dechlorinator to break them down (this causes the ammonia to be freed and now is in the water also ready to kill your fish). 

I didn't realize it until it started getting dry and a lot of water evaporated out of the tank. So I topped off a lot of water into the tank that had ammonia in it. I used dechlorinator thinking that I was treating chlorine. And as I made this mistake ammonia was released into my top off bottle and I dumped it on my fish.

That didn't work out so hot. So apparently everyone deals with this a different way. My problem really only brings 0.5 ppm of ammonia which lots of fish could tolerate. Invertebrates take a beating. But depending on what you keep, you may never know. I like snails and shrimp, to the point where I go to great lengths to make the water all hard and nice for them. So when I found out I may be dumping ammonia in my tank, I didn't feel so good.

Now these guys are sort of telling me that it may not be the normal level that did the damage. Lots of fish and even invertebrates can deal with the occasional 0.5 ppm ammonia water change. And I never did more than 25% once a week for months. But this idea of the water company doing an occasional spike if they are trying to "shock the pool" or correct something, that level might be way higher for a short period. Maybe my big massacre was a spike like that. I'm going to contact my local club (been meaning to join but I am busy and Covid shy) and get the low-down about this. I actually know where the extension office is. So I may hit them up as well.

And now that I am thinking about this I always thought it was weird that every pet shop around here sold tons of ammonia pads. It's not like I do this every day. But I have thought several times to myself, "Why does every place have like 4 sizes of ammonia pads?" I just didn't think all fish stores would stock so much of that particular item and I kinda wondered who was having so much trouble with it. Was that a saltwater problem? Duh...now I am thinking people incorporate ammonia pads into their water conditioning somehow. Are people putting these in cannister filters or HOBs and conditioning a trashcan? That would make sense and maybe you could process that in just a few minutes. You would just have to test pretty mush every time you ever did it.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Buckman
Typo

[Scott Stevenson]

That sucks, sorry about ur tank, thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense now. I'll have to keep a heads up for anything like that here. I live in a small town and they always monkey with the water in the spring/summer.