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GW has been off on vacation/work in the San Francisco area & elsewhere for
14 days and purposely left home and work email behind. After 20 wineries, a
week of good science and an evening with 2 very interesting plant people I
have a lot of catching up to do :-)
I think Julie said it pretty well though, you can get by with just regular
dechlor. I also ran some tests after adding the water back to see how much
ammonia was still around. Once the tank was filled and the filters were
going there really wasn't any ammonia. This holds for tanks with fairly
light planting too as the sponge filters and the bugs in the gravel suck it
up pretty quickly. God help you if you forget to add dechlor to water that
has chloramine in it though! It really messes up the fish. BTW I really
don't consider anything less than 50% a water change. Also to keep my addle
brain from killing any more fish (by not adding chlorine remover) I usually
dose my water in 3 55 gallon barrels and mix it well before adding to the
tanks. I would suggest that all I am adding to my tanks from this would be
ammonia (from the breakdown of chloramine by the dechlor) and no chloramine.
Before using this technique I also did 50% changes and added water directly
into the tank from the tap along with a Generous supply of dechlor, which
was added often during the process. I have to admit that you "might" get
some chloramine into the gills of your fish this way BUT I didn't see a lot
of unhealthy fish doing it this way that died either right away or 2-3 days
later. It just doesn't happen IF you have a good filter in place. Plants
make even a stronger arguement. BTW my pH comes out of the tap over 8 but
drops quickly due to a 2-3 KH buffering hardness. I purposely add baking
soda to this water to help push up the buffer capacity a bit so I would be
dealing with the more dangerous ion.
On a chemistry note I would strongly suggest that Tyrone NOT write a
chemistry book due to inability to "move the decimal place" correctly.
"3.5 ppm = 35 g/L which is alot!" is what I see that he wrote.
Doing the math - 3.5 parts per million. One liter weighs a million
milligrams (or 1000 grams) SO
1 mg per liter equals 1ppm. This is why gallons suck and liters rule :-)
even though I still think in terms of gallons and degrees F for my tank
measurements. Moving on - 3.5 ppm = 3.5 milligrams per liter so Tyrone is
off by 4 decimal places when he suggested that it was 35,000 milligrams per
liter. Based on this information I would suggest that Tyrone is actually a
Cloner/DNA jock and not the hard core "biochemistry" dude of "P450 Lab,
Biochemistry Department, University of Stellenbosch" as we biochemistry
jocks wouldn't make that big of an error :-) come clean Tyrone!
One other point - If 3.5 ppm really means chloramine and not chlorine
equilivalents then splitting the molecule up would give you a lower actual
dose of chlorine OR ammonia. I would bet that their tests might be related
to chlorine equilivalents. Many KH/GH test kits are also set up in this
fashion. I have added 15 ppm (15 mg per liter) of magnesium or calcium
under laboratory conditions and obtained much higher values when then
testing the kits. It wasn't due to test kit inaccuracies though but rather
to the 15 ppm meaning 15 ppm of CaOH (or Ca carbonate) equilivants, I forget
which at the moment. You can't always tell by reading the kit instructions
but if your water company says 3.5 ppm chloramine and you break it and come
back with 3.5 ppm ammonia then you know it's chlorine equilivants and not
3.5 ppm chloramine.
W/O a good filter in place though you are totally nuts not to use Amquel.
If I were to move my fish (and only 15% or less of the water) I would slowly
add water to those tanks and use Amquel. I guess the big ? is why did a
tank that was moved have such a difficult time recycling? Unless you really
cleaned the gravel and filters you still should have had a fairly good
bacteria bed and it should have recovered very quickly. When moving, get
the dirt out of the gravel with a few churns in the bucket but don't get
carried away. Wash the outside filters/sponge filters to remove the main
dirt and then keep them moist. Keeping a lot of dirt on the filter and
summerged will result in an anerobic condition which will kill the bacteria
and the fish. Just ask anyone who has had a 12-16 hour power outage. I
guess the bottom line would have been to have owned a good test kit so that
you could test ammonia and nitrite and nitrate levels of both your tank
water and your addition water. If you move make sure you carry Amquel. And
always check to make sure to see if you are moving into a chloramine area so
you can deal with it properly. I think it's also time to invest in a KH/GH
test kit to really see how much "lime" is really in your water. Tetra's
"Laborett" will set you back about $30 or less through a catalog and will
handle GH, KH nitrite (not very useful) and ammonia (very useful). That kit
alone I guess would have saved the ?$50 or more loss that you encountered?
The tetra ammonia kit will also handle Amquel and other ammonia removing
products. Any ammonia test kit that has "Nesslers" reagent will not and in
my opinion should be discarded. The reason being if you do see an ammonia
problem adding Amquel will help but the readings with Nessler kits will not
read correctly. Also as a last ditch effort, lowering the pH to 6.9 would
have helped a true ammonia problem IF you had the measuring tools in hand to
realize this was the problem. pH Down (about $3) would have been a
temperary solution. If I had hard water ( 300-400 ppm) now I would probably
consider using CO2 to lower the pH on a tank instead of RO as a permanant
solution. Obviously it will depend on you actual KH but in the long run
will probably be cheaper if you can lower it in this manner instead of using
RO. RO users get stingy with water changes which is VERY BAD for rainbows.
Of course this will also mean that you have to add plenty of lights and
plants to all of your tanks. This might have the unpleasant effect of
showing your rainbows off under their best possible conditions but it might
be a necessary evil :-)
If you are totally bored of the declor question please add another subject
title such as "dechlor/collecting" so those at home can follow along :-)
Final Question: Amquel/ammonia binder/collecting native Oz fishes
Klaus Schoening, who I think might still be on this list really advocates
using Amquel (or if you will, an ammonia binder) while collecting Darters
and minnows in the Midwest. He suggested that the minnows really produce a
lot of ammonia in their relatively small container and that this was really
tough on them. Adding a good dosing of Amquel he says, helps solve this
problem. As an added bonus, while collecting in July we were adding ice to
the cooler. Most likely that ice contained some chloramines. This
technique did work very well and we really didn't lose many fish. He also
doses with a sulfa drug once they are home in the tanks because of the
potentially rough handling that occured while netting. With out this he
feels he gets a lot of infections. I specifically asked him whether he did
the "Aussie salt trick" which is a "andful of salt" in a "aful 5 gallon
bucket" to calm the fish down. Some of those shiners make rainbows seem
pretty peaceful in comparison. He didn't use any salt but the next time I
go collecting for natives in MO I will try this with a few minnows. Since I
ran into leeches for the first time in Missouri (thank god I didn't get
water over my knees) the salt may also have other uses. So the question
back to people collecting rainbows, Pseudomugils and gudgeons in Australia
is:
Do you use any Amquel (ammonia binder) in your collecting bucket? Also do
you treat with any type of antibiotic like a sulfa drug when you get you
fish home? I haven't used the other ammonia binder that has been suggested
(Seachem?) on this list so I don't know if it really acts in the exact same
manner. There was another type out a few years ago that mainly just
produced a slime coat on the fish and supposedly just contained a percentage
of formaldehyde. With the larger fish it might be worthwhile to add
something or in the very least carry a test kit and make a few measurements
to see if they ammonia goes up quickly in the holding container. Perhaps a
combo of the techniques would help increase the numbers that get back home,
especially concerning the larger ones.
Gary (GW) Lange