Confused- Tap Water Testing 0.25 Ammonia?

[Billsfan905]

I tested my tap water with the API master kit test and it is clearly green, maybe even 0.5ppm!
What could be causing this? Is my test inaccurate or is there actually ammonia in my tap water?

 

[Staxx]

could be ammonia straight from tap. its possible.

 

[Em29]

Yes it could be in your water - however your filter bacteria should process that fairly quickly. I would only do the necessary water changes - maybe more frequent smaller changes rather than big changes?

 

[ladymaverick]

Chloramines in the water will also give a positive ammonia result on API. Either easy, as long as you dose with something like Seachem Prime at water changes, you should be fine.

 

[lisa2701]

My tap water also has .25 ammonia, and i panicked when I saw it, but the lovely people here assured me its ok and that my filter would process it quick enough and I've had my fish a few days now and everything is reading as it should so don't worry about it.

Also on another note (my apologise if you knew this - I didn't and it caused me problems so thought i'd share), I discovered if you read the tests under fluorescent (or in my case 'any' artificial) light then it looks more green than it actually is. i have started only reading my ammonia in natural day light. Also, if I don't dry my tests before using them, mines shows .25 ammonia. So you could always try cleaning and drying the test tube, and doing the test again and reading it in natural day light and seeing if this changes your reading, assuming your not already doing this of course.

Good luck

 

[Billsfan905]

I treated my tap water with conditioner before doing the test! WOW you never know what's in your tap water eh!
Unfortunately 3 of my tanks are still cycling.. I wondered why doing 2 80% water changes daily still left me with ammonia.


lisa2701 that's great advice! I was testing under fluorescent lighting, I will start looking under natural light!

I'll take any advice I can get

 

[Moby-Krib]

Always a good idea to do a full panel of tests on your tap water so you have a baseline to work from.
My tap water has .25ppm Ammonia (In the form of chloramine) and 20ppm Nitrate.
In the summertime I sometimes see this number higher, I figure they up the dose occasionally to flush any Algae or other contaminates out of the supply lines in the warmer weather.

So I never test for Ammonia for at least 12hrs after a water change as I would just end up seeing a positive result.
As stated the use of a good quality conditioner will bind the Ammonia up into a much less toxic form and should not be harmful to your stock as it is processed away.