Dechlorination Confusion

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

My Aqueon Water Conditioner bottle says that it:

- Instantly neutralizes chlorine and chloramines
- Helps reduce fish stress
- Aids in restoring the natural slime coat
- Detoxifies heavy metals, ammonia and other elements released from fish waste.

My tap water contains both chlorine and chloramines. If I test my tap water directly from the source it measures Ammonia - 2ppm.
If I use the water conditioner on the tap water and test again it still measures Ammonia - 2 ppm.

What does this mean? Is my conditioner failing to "detoxify ammonia" as it claims it is supposed to do? Does "detoxify ammonia" = turn it into ammonium, or does it mean something else??

Seems like I can't use my tap water for my aquarium either way. Even if the ammonia has been rendered safe by the conditioner, testing for it in my tank will be useless since I can't distinguish between "detoxified ammonia" and "dangerous ammonia".

Here are the ingredients in the water conditioner:

Sodium thiosulfate
disodium EDTA
sodium carbonate
polyvinylprollidones

Can someone help me understand what is happening and what I should do?

 

[waterdrop]

Hi there. Don't worry, you have a very typical "conditioner".. same kind of stuff we all use - the Sodium Thiosulfate is the main thing of importance (the thing that neutralizes chlorine and chloramines.)

The business of neutralizing ammonia means converting it from the NH3 form to the NH4 ammonium form which is not directly toxic. This only works for about 24 hours and as such means it's no real substitute for a biofilter, but it can be a help in difficult situations. Our beneficial autotrophic bacteria, by the way, can "eat" (process) both forms of nitrogen equally well, so "neutralized" ammonia feeds them just as well.

Also, don't worry about having some ammonia in your tap water, many do. In the end it will just mean that perhaps you'll do slightly smaller and more frequent water changes as a kind of reflex response. (eg. when one of us says perform a 50% water change you'll say to yourself, well I'll do two 25% water changes, considering my water source.) You see, once you have a working biofilter, it will easily grab that ammonia water and the ammonia oxidizers will convert the little extra ammonia into nitrite(NO2), no problem. And if your water changes are smaller at any given time (followed maybe a couple hours later by another one for instance) then the immediate introduction of the 2ppm ammonia water will be diluted (an 8th of a tank change would show 0.25ppm theoretically I suppose, but in practice you'll probably be able to do what looks/feels/is a larger change without seeing a greater than 0.25ppm level coming in.

Yes, cycling will be a little trickier but it can be done just fine.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

Thanks so much for the response. It's a real bummer that it is going to be trickier for me ... it is already tricky enough since I am dealing with a 5 gallon tank.

I am going to start a fishless cycle now .. and try to figure out how to do it properly given my ammonia readings will include both "ammonia" and "ammonium".

 

[JoshuaA]

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Waterdrop, would you think it would be far-fetched to believe that because of the high concentrations of ammonia in the tap water, there are likely to be higher concentrations of Ammonia reducing bacteria naturally occuring?

I think this could ultimately lead to a strong bacterial colony but like WD said once you do 10/20% changes your 2ppm will be diluted instantly in the water and being ammonium it is harmless so there should nothing to worry about once you get the cycle going!

 

[ZoddyZod]

are you sure the 2ppm ammonia reading is correct? That's awfully high for tap water. What sort of kit are you using to test? Is it a liquid based kit or strips?

 

[JoshuaA]

are you sure the 2ppm ammonia reading is correct? That's awfully high for tap water. What sort of kit are you using to test? Is it a liquid based kit or strips?

In the EU I know that drinking water has a limit of 0.5mg NH4/l before it is deemed unworthy of human consumption, however if they're living elsewhere it can be even further out if there are no restrictions or regulations.

 

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

Yes, the tap water reading for ammonia is 2 ppm, maybe 1.5ppm at the lowest.

I am using the API Freshwater Master Test Kit (liquid based).

Rather than straight ammonia, that reading could be detecting the ammonia that is part of the chloramine in the water .. especially since I get the same reading when I test the tap water before adding the dechlorinator, and after adding it.

 

[OldMan47]

The sodium thiosulphate will indeed remove all of the chlorine that is present in your water. It is the main active ingredient in any dechlorinator worth having.
What you are facing with before and after readings that are both high in ammonia content is that both ammonia, NH3, and ammonium ions, NH4, are equally easy for your test kit to measure. When you use a proper dechlorinator, the nitrogen of ammonia is bound into the less toxic form of ammonia. The test will continue to show the ammonia no matter which form it takes. In my own case, I see about 0.5 ppm of ammonia whenever I do a water change. That 0.5ppm is tied up in the non-toxic condition and is removed by my conditioner. If I measure the ammonia present, the total remaining ammonia is not changed. What I know is that the bacteria are more than capable of using that 0.5 ppm of ammonia that shows up, so after a very few hours, the ammonia is gone.

 

[raptorrex]

Waterdrop, would you think it would be far-fetched to believe that because of the high concentrations of ammonia in the tap water, there are likely to be higher concentrations of Ammonia reducing bacteria naturally occuring?

I think this could ultimately lead to a strong bacterial colony but like WD said once you do 10/20% changes your 2ppm will be diluted instantly in the water and being ammonium it is harmless so there should nothing to worry about once you get the cycle going!

that would be how i expect it to work. Ammonia is Ammonia, after all.

 

[waterdrop]

Waterdrop, would you think it would be far-fetched to believe that because of the high concentrations of ammonia in the tap water, there are likely to be higher concentrations of Ammonia reducing bacteria naturally occuring?

I think this could ultimately lead to a strong bacterial colony but like WD said once you do 10/20% changes your 2ppm will be diluted instantly in the water and being ammonium it is harmless so there should nothing to worry about once you get the cycle going!

that would be how i expect it to work. Ammonia is Ammonia, after all.

Interesting Josh, so are you speculating that if the tap water happens to have some ammonia in it that perhaps it will also be really good for starting fishless cycles because it will naturally have more A-Bacs present from the start? If so, that's a really thoughtful idea and I can't see why it might not be true. If it were true then I guess it'd be a nice little bonus payback for the other bother of having ammonia in there .

WD

 

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

Okay so if my tank has 0ppm Ammonia, and I do a 20% water change with my 2ppm ammmonium dechlorinated tap water ... I end up with 0.4 ammonium in my tank. My bacteria have 24 hours to process this before it turns into ammonia. They must process it in addition to their normal duties of processing the fish waste, respiration, etc. Probably better for me to do 2 10% water changes 24 hours apart. That way my bacteria only need to process an additional 0.2ppm ammonium each time.

Some other questions ... who came up with the 24 hour rule? Couldn't that vary based on the Ph level of your tank water, and the brand of dechlorinator you use, and maybe other things?

Also, I need to know at what level of nitrates it makes sense to change the water. So 2ppm ammonia, breaks down into how many ppm nitrate when the overall process is done?

For example, if 0.2ppm ammonia breaks down to 8ppm nitrate, and my tank water currently reads 7ppm nitrate, then I wouldn't want to change the water yet.

Thanks!

 

[OldMan47]

Don't worry too much about your tap water ammonia Crusty.
I do huge water changes, sometimes as much as a 90% water change using my 0.5 ppm water. The end result after a few minutes can well be water at 0.5 ppm of ammonia, the limit for drinking water. That water's ammonia is non-toxic so I ignore it. The fish recover from their chemical stress, the only reason I would do such a big change.
I have functional biological filters so the ammonia is gone rather quickly and life in my tank goes right back to normal.
When I wish to do a water change, I no longer worry about doing a 30% or larger water change. My bacterial colonies do indeed respond well to the added ammonia and quickly remove it. As we have seen speculated, the A-bac population inside the water mains does lead some water providers to increase the concentration of chloramines they use to help them avoid losing effective treatment because of the bacteria living in the pipes. Some water systems have a rather robust bacterial colony of A-bacs growing on the walls of the supply pipes.

 

[waterdrop]

So Crusty, does it make sense what OM is saying? Once a biofilter is really mature (especially after 6 months or a year) it will be very powerful add pulling little added amounts of ammonia - the kind of extra ammonia you would be seeing from water changes would be very easy for it (in addition to the fish) and it would disappear very rapidly.

It is also really not much of an issue for a fishless cycle (definately better than if you were doing a fish-in cycle!) It may just mean reducing your dose by a tiny amount, that's all.

You're absolutely correct about my 24 hour generalization - that's just boilerplate I throw out and obviously it would vary and vary by various other parameters like pH. We sometimes get into tricky cases where people have taken on fish abandoned by other people but they have ammonia in their tap water and are trying to fish-in cycle their biofilters upward to handle the addition and trying to keep the fish safe with conditioner - it doesn't usually work out very easily!

Each 1ppm of ammonia creates 2.7ppm of nitrite(NO2) and then goes on to create 3.6ppm of nitrate(NO3). Only at the very end of fishless cycling do we sometimes consider water changes because of NO3 in the 160ppm arena, otherwise we resist changing unless the pH drops below 6.6 or so. After the big water change and getting fish everything is different. Then the nitrate(NO3) test becomes a more useful thing.

So in the running tank with fish we like to test every week for NO3 for a while and record it in our aquarium notebook so that we can watch the NO3 trend. Nitrate is our "canary in the coal mine," helping us project what might be happening with the hundreds of other heavy metals and organics that build up in a tank. We want to change water to remove all those hundreds of things and nitrate also. Often we find that a well-maintained tank will stabilize at about 15 or 20ppm nitrate -above- whatever the tap nitrate is. We watch it and if it continues to creep up, that means our weekly gravel-clean-water-change should be more aggressive and/or our monthly filter cleans might need to be more frequent.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

Yes, waterdrop, it makes sense.
I suppose I have plenty of information, now.
I think I might pick up some Seachem Prime.
Also, I am in day 10 of my fishless cycle, Ammonia 1.0ppm, Nitrite 1.0ppm -- woo hoo!
When I am finished (long way to go yet), I guess as long as I can keep this wimpy floss pad filter cartridge media intact, my fish will have a happy home.

 

[waterdrop]

Good luck with your fishless cycle. Don't forget to keep an eye out for pH dropping too much. WD