Water Quality

[Htomassini]

Tom in reading your posts, you advocate using tap water for tanks and you've also mentioned how you only use a carbon filter for the chlorine when doing your w/c. Here in Ft Lauderdale i started with tap but I used to have a lot of issues (not besides being rock hard at ph of 8.5+++) that I went with ro. The city has not issued a water analysis since 2009 and they burn the pipes with chloramine. The water here is also very yellow, our ice cubes are disgusting not to mention that if you have a white tub and you fill it to take a bath, it looks like someone peed in it.

So My question is two fold, how do you get rid of the ammonium from the chloramine? I know that the carbon filter will take care of the chlorine, do you still use prime or a like product for that? Also the ammonium is still in the water but no longer an irritant like ammonia, so how does it go away?

Thanks

 

[1077]

Can't/won't speak for Tom, lest evil plant monster's come and place a curse on my tank but for myself .. I too have chloramines in water supply, and use Prime to detoxify the ammonia portion of chloramines along with the chlorine, and plant's along with biological filter process the ammonium from chloramines.

 

[Cyclesafe]

An activated carbon fliter removes chloramine as well as chlorine. You can test if your carbon is still working with a chloramine / chlorine test strip. If any chloramine escapes the filter, it will affect your critters. If in doubt use Prime.

Ammonium and ammonia exist in your tank in equilibrium. The relative amount of each depends on pH. The higher the pH, the more ammonia. When less toxic ammonium is converted to more toxic ammonia, fauna are damaged. I think that this is what happens during so-called "pH shock". Ammonium is used by plants or converted eventually to nitrate in the nitrogen cycle.

The yellow tint to your water might be tanins. People pay a lot of money to bathe in tea.

You can get carbon filtered non-RO water from your RO unit by by-passing the RO membrane. Often these units already have a by-pass used to purge the "little-plastic-doohickey" that meters water into the membrane. After it flushes, that stream can be used instead of tap. The carbon takes out tanins too!