Well water, ammonia and prime

[BMBLSAD]

Hi all

I have 7 planted tanks: 4 tanks with a betta each, 1 29g with guppies and rasboras, 1 40g with rhads, and a 75g with orandas.  I have a choice of using either well water or softened water.  I've been using softened, but my plants have never done well no matter how I fertilize and they're all beginner, low light plants like Javas, anubias, etc.  I've also read that softened water can be hard on fish long term.  So, I would like to slowly change over to well water but my well water shows 1.0 for ammonia.  If I treat it with Prime, will it detox the ammonia long enough for the established biofilters in the tanks to take over?

[Cory]

Prime would do that, but if you say change 30% of the water at a time, the ammonia would only read 0.33 in the tank which is pretty low and probably doesn't even need prime. 

[BMBLSAD]

Doh!  of course.  It's that pesky math.  Gets me every time!  Thanks 🙂  

[gardenman]

My well water is off the scale in terms of ammonia. I never use it fresh from the tap because of that. I have a bunch of old plastic kitty litter containers that I use to hold the water until I need it and after a few days in the bottles it's more manageable. I suspect I've developed bacterial colonies in there that feed on the ammonia in the water. I also use Prime as an extra step just before putting it in the tank and there's never a problem. The kitty litter bottles last forever, are essentially free and would just go for recycling if I didn't reuse them to hold water. (I use Cats Pride Scoopable litter and it comes in 12 lb bottles for under $6 at Walmart and each bottle holds about two gallons or so.) The only real long term issue is nitrates. When you start out with a ton of ammonia, you end up with a ton of nitrates. Water changes don't solve the nitrate issue as you're just dumping in more when your initial ammonia levels are high.  I keep my tanks very heavily planted to help contain the nitrates then toss out the overgrowth of the plants to physically remove the nitrates, but my nitrate levels are always higher than I'd like, but my fish do fine.