Chlormine - go away go away go away

[SombreroDance]

Ok,
first thing is - hello im new,
im a moderator of a fish forum in Israel
nice to meet you all ,
our countrys main water supplier raised drastically the chlormine
ammounts in the water, and whoever gets water from them and makes a water change of 20% or more will wake up in the morning with all his fish floating
in the water...
i have a kinda ridicouls theory -
Ascorbic acid (that's right, vitamin C...) is supposed to kill chlormine
so i heard... so i was thinking of maybe grinding vitamin C pills into fine powder
and putting some in the water...
that's one question, the other is -
can it hurt the fish...?

 

[SirMinion]

on its own I doubt Vitamin C would harm the fish, but vitamin suppliment tablets also contain a host of other ingrediants including sugar and/or atificial sweetners & flavours which might do more harm than good.

Most good brands of water conditioners will also neutralise chloramines. I think that is where the answer to your question lies.

Welcome to TropicalFishForums!

 

[Bignose]

Vitamin pills only contain micrograms of the actual vitamins they are delivering. The rest is inert fillers and binders (used to more easily form the ingrediants into a pill shape).

SirMinion has a good point, though, that almost any water conditioner today neutralizes chloramines as well as chlorine. For example, the bottle on Marineland Labs' Bio Coat conditioner says one teaspoon (~5 mL) will remove 4.0 ppm of chlorine and 6.0 ppm of chloramine in 10 gallons of water. Plus, have you seen the price of some vitamin supplements today? I think that the water conditioner is cheaper!

 

[SombreroDance]

but the chlormine quantitis are huge in the water...

 

[Tolak]

Sodium thiosulfate is the chemical used to neuteralize chlorine & chloramine. http/www.chemistrystore.com/sodium_thiosulfate.htm Gives some prices for bulk powder, it's bound to be cheaper than vitamin c. I don't know the availability of chemicals in your country, but it shouldn't be too hard to track down.

I can usually smell the chlorine products in water when I fill a bucket, you may have to go by smell to figure out how much you need to use. I use prime in my tanks, it says you can safely double dose with it. It's main ingredient is sodium thiosulfate. I have been using 150% of the dosage required for a long time, it doesn't cause any problems.

I hate saying that you should experiment with fish, but this may be a case where you could take a less valuable fish, put it in a smaller tank or bucket, and slowly increase the amount of dechlorinator until it shows signs of trouble. The MSDS says that 8g/kg was non-toxic when ingested by a rat.

Tolak

 

[Jules H-T]

Chemicals are not your only option. I copied and pasted this from a post I made recently on the subject, buried deep within a topic about what water we use. Perhaps a holding tank with an activated carbon filter or two is your answer...

....Methods of treatment:
1. Distillation does not work effectively.

2. Reverse Osmosis (RO) is not well documented, but early results show it is next to useless for monochloramine (the kind we predominantly find in tap water) when using HR (CA) membranes. PA RO systems are thought to remove more, but Chloramines have a significantly lower oxidative potential than Hypochlorite or the hypochloride ion so they are going to be filtered out less than Chlorine would be. THF membranes have a tighter pore structure so should remove more (up to 90% in R&D lab conditions), but the exposure of THF RO membranes to chloramines in higher concentrations than 3ppm has not been explored that I can find and may damage the membrane. So for those using RO water, do you know if there are chloramines in the source, and do you know which mebrane they are using

3. The best non chemical intensive way of removing Chloramines from water by far, is by exposure to activated carbon. The finer the GAC particles the better. So were one to have chloraminated water whacking a fluval with a carbon filter in your resevoir tank/bucket is a good option.

4. Chemically. There are 2 options here, Sodium Thiosulphate and Hydroxymethanesulphonate. The former has the potential to screw with your pH. The latter (used in Amquel and possibly Ammo-Lock 2) doesn't seem to. I have not found a lot of solid info on the effects of the resulting biproducts or unused reagents, but there are questions here particluarly for fry, eggs, and larvae. Breeders beware. How a dechlor manufacturer knows how much of a reactant to put in to get rid of sufficient volumes of chlorine and chloramine, without knowing the water source, is clear: putting in loads of stuff to get rid of it at almost any acceptable level.

Useful further reading/some sources:
http/www.gewater.com/library/tp/813_Chloramines_.jsp
http/www.show.scot.nhs.uk/scieh/environm...Chloramines.pdf
http/ukdiscus.co.uk/chloramines.htm

 

[Bignose]

yes, Jules, but how much activated carbon is going to be necessary? Especially for frequent water changes? I suspect the cost for the necessary activated carbon is going to be huge. The water conditioners have got to be about the simplist and cheapest way to go about htis.

Just how much chloramines are in your water anyway? If you cannot get it tested, the water company should be required to give you that information. There cannot be too much as it is expected to be used fro human consumption, right? There must be an upper limit to the total chloramines that are present, but research has shown that levels around 2 ppm are pretty much harmless to humans. But 2 ppm is easily handled by the liquid water conditions in any LFS.

What is really needed to for you to ask your water company how much (what concentration) of chloramines are actually in your water.

 

[Tolak]

I think a charcoal dechlorinating system will get a little pricy for someone considering grinding up vitamin C tabs to deal with dechlorinating. If you want to spend some money once & not have to keep worrying about buying chemicals or charcoal, drill a well & be done with it.

I do agree with using as little chemical substances in an aquarium as possible, but you are dealing with a person from another forum, in another country, who's members are probably as spread out distance wise as this forum. There probably is differences in the water supply from one area to another, just like anywhere else. More than likely not everyone there can afford a charcoal setup. At around $2 per pound, sodium thiosulfate is a reasonably cheap alternative. Hydroxymethanesulphonate, the main ingredient in Tetra's AquaSafe, Amquel, and ChlorAm-X, will work also. People around the world have been using these products for years with great success. Unless you massivly overdose the tank they work well.

My biggest concern with charcoal is that it looses it's effectiveness over time. Chemicals for declorinating are one less variable to have to worry about.

I don't know much about Israel, so I really don't kow anything about their water processing plants. Here in the U.S., you can contact the water company & they will send you a detailed data sheet showing what is in the water & how much. This may be worth looking into, as you will know what you are dealing with no matter which option you choose to go with. If you get these stats, please post them, as I would like to check them out just out of curiosity.

Tolak

 

[Tropjunky]

Well I'd go and get a RO unit if you're not on a water meter and a De-ionizer if you are. Basically the two do the same thing but RO wastes loads of water. The problem you're left with is that the water that comes out is almost pure so u have to add minerals and stuff. I don't have either but I do buy RO and it cost me £3.50 and 50p for the minerals.

I'd recomend this method of getting water to anyone because it's the most stable way to get it.

 

[Jules H-T]

@bignose: Two gpm per square foot and 4 foot deep for an empty bed contact time of 15 minutes provides over one year run time with 1-2 ppm chloramine feed with effluent of less than 0.1 ppm.

Apparently! (quoted directly out of the second article I linked to)

I will confess that getting my head around what that means is stretching me.

@Tolak, I bow to your obviously superior knowledge, I've only been researching and have no experience.

As I understand it though, the activated carbon is largely a catalyst rather than a reactant and runs out very slowly. You're not going to be replacing them every other day to get 5 litres of water out are you?

Can anyone put the above into the context of the amount of carbon available in a fluval 4 insert combined with the impact of the available flow rate?

Would you actually need a full on specially designed dechlorinating plant, or can something cheap and effective be cobbled together our of stuff we all use day in day out?

By no means am I insisting this is even a good way of doing it, more stating that it's possible and asking for help visualising how it might work in a home environment.

Levels are available from UK water cos too, but whether that's true in Israel is anyone's guess.

 

[Undawada]

Just a thought, the active ingredient in dechlorinator is Sodium Thiosulphate, also used in photography as "fixer" during developing. I wonder if photography supply places could sell pure Sodium Thiosulphate at higher concentrations?

Would probably be cheaper, but you would have to do some maths to figure out how much to use.