Water Quality Questions

[Tropical_Fish]

Reading one of waterdrops posts on another topic he had suggested that the user did a search on google to find their tap water stats - which would in turn tell if dechlorinater was necessary - or if leaving a bucket overnight would suffice.

Interested by this I did a search for my own stats, and found that our local water authority lets you put in your postcode and gives you the results for your area, mine are as follows:


Hardness Level Moderately hard
Hardness Clark 13.32 Degrees Clark
Hardness French 19.03 French Degrees
Hardness German 10.66 German Degrees
Aluminium 11.00 μgAl/l
Chloride 21.04 mgCl/l
Chlorine 0.14 mg/l
Coliform bacteria 0 no./100ml
Colour 0.40 mg/l Pt/Co
Conductivity 381.50 μS/cm at 20°C
E.coli bacteria 0 no./100ml
Fluoride 0.07 mgF/l
Iron 21.25 μgFe/l
Manganese 2.81 μgMn/l
Nitrate 30.76 mgNO3/l
Odour 0 Dilution Number
Pesticides 0 μg/l
pH 7.10 pH Value
Sodium 8.38 mgNa/l
Taste 0 Dilution Number
Plumbing Metals
Copper 0.05 mgCu/l
Lead 0.61 μgPb/l
Nickel 1.44 μgNi/l


No idea what most of that means! But I presume the level of chlorine would mean I need to use a water conditioner?

 

[loachman]

It depends on the source of the chlorine.
"Normal" chlorine will go away after a while of letting a bucket sit. I'm guessing that is what they use, but I'm not sure.
If they use chloramine, that will not go away by letting the bucket of water sit.

I'd use a dechlorinator though, as they're relatively cheap especially if you get a concentrated bottle of it. Pond dechlorinator is much stronger than the typical aquarium stuff, and I have a bottle of pond dechlorinator last about a 9-12 months on a 75 gal. It is not easy to overdose on dechlorinator, so there isn't a huge risk.

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, I believe the context of my original comments came when one of our members needed to change water but had run out of conditioner and wasn't going to be able to get to the LFS to pick up conditioner right away. He inquired about releasing chlorine by standing it overnight and as part of the answer I directed him to check the website as it was late evening when he couldn't phone in. The assumption was he'd get conditioner as soon as possible.

Tropical_Fish, you could augment your info by making a phone call, hopefully getting directed in to their water lab, and asking specifically whether they use chlorine or chloramine. The listing you give looks to be standard output of an analysis and its not clear what their policy would be about simply reporting the baseline chlorine of the water prior to treatment or whether its actually a post-treatment figure.

While talking with them you could also make a try at talking "hardness." Usually this doesn't work out as they speak a bit of a different language about than we do but you could explain that as a hobbyist you generally are interested in both general hardness (what I assume they are giving, shown in 3 different types of units (german being the one we use by default in the hobby)) and then the division of that into "permanent hardness" and "temporary hardness (aka carbonate hardness)" or perhaps they know what the "total alkalinity" is. Its just kind of an interesting thing I think to make the attempt just out of curiosity, but often doesn't result in a clear discussion, depends on who you get.

Beginners happening on this thread might note a couple of interesting things. First of all, for some, its a surprising glimpse of the fact that there are plenty of other things in the water that we don't normally talk about much. Its some of these that will build up if you simply "top up evaporated water" and helps one understand the importance of water changes. Secondly, its interesting to see that there's some iron in there, a thing needed in traces for bacterial growth, but that calcium is not specifically listed. We know of course that Ca must be in there as it will be one of the primary metals playing a role in the hardness figures. Ca is another ubiquitous thing intertwined with life, including all the fish, plants and bacteria in the tank.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Tropical_Fish]

Wow - most of that is over my head!

The data had a paragraph before it, which stated that the data is an average based on thousands of samples direct from customers taps.

So post treatment.

Other than that it just says that the water is from ground water treated at works.


If it is of interest to you there was a link at the end of the page which gave a detailed report via pdf, I have linked the report below, most of it means nothing to me but there is a little more detail on chlorine. What made me laugh was on the webpage it said that the readings were based on thousands of samples - just take a look at the number of samples taken on the detailed report!

Water Report

 

[waterdrop]

Yes, I looked all around your Sev/Trent water site and its typical in the sense of having conflicting information. It has a nice pdf writeup all about chlorination that always refers to chlorine as being used but then way down in the FAQs you finally find a full FAQ on chloramination that implies that "of course" chloramination is used, lol.

This is why I always recommend calling and talking to their lab folks if you are truly curious as this will nicely confirm the truth usually. This is all out of curiosity. Conditioners are almost universally mixed up now to take care of both chlorine and chloramine and they are cheap, easy and recommended to use. Water authorities are not sending the water out for fishtanks, its people they're concerned about and they will take it upon themselves to add some additional chlorine-based treatments if they feel they test and feel they have a sudden human bacteria problem. This is why some of the experienced ones on TFF have recommended that conditioner be dosed even at 1.5x or 2x the recommended amount when you still have young bacterial colonies or when you have new fry or spawning parent fish, situations like that. When cycling however, it has also been mentioned (Hovanec et.al.) that conditioner above 2x dosing may slow Nitrospira growth rates. This is why I recommend not going above 2x overdosing on conditioner. (Note that BTT and I have discussed this further though and I'm not able to come up with the written or published reference, but I distinctly remember Hovanec mentioning this in a post or PM.)

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Tropical_Fish]

Thanks for the info, there is some interesting bits there,

I will use a conditioner in all water changes - mainly due to the fact that it's easier than remembering to put buckets out - but I was more interested partly out of curiosity and partly 'just in case' if I ever run out etc.

I presume that most people don't test for chlorine after conditioning? and you just presume that the process has worked?

 

[waterdrop]

Ya got that right! There are liquid kits out there for chlorine but I don't know how accurate they are and I've certainly never done it. wd