Disastrous Water Change

[MonsterFishCreeper]

In my opinion I fell an 80% water change is way to much. I would only do a large water change if there was a problem with the water. Being you have just done a water change, 20% would have been sufficient. If there is ammonia in your water. That I no nothing about. If you feed small amounts of food once a day there its no reason for your water to become foul where you would have to do such a big water change. If your filters are properly cycled with the right amount of beneficial bacteria in them the Ammonia and nitrites should be 0. It is always better to do smaller water changes more often then large water changes. I hope this helps. Good Luck.

Did you even read the mans post? He didn't intend to do an 80% water change...

Also, how can you say 20% should have been sufficient, you don't know what his nitrates were. A lot of people here do 50% or more water changes once or twice a week depending on bio load, myself included. I also don't know if I agree with your assessment that numerous small water changes are necessarily better then larger WC. There's no substitute for clean water and low nitrates.

 

[Def Leppard Hysteria]

That is a major drag, I hope your losses are done and the rest of your fish all bounce back. Were you planning a big water change on the 200 to?

I was planning on doing a 50% change on the 300 and the 265, but I'm still a little gun shy from this morning. I did do a 20% change on our 600 gallon FRT tank and there were no adverse affects to the fish, but the ammonia did measure at .25ppm after the change. But, I don't know if that is a result of using Seachem Safe and getting a false reading so soon after the water change.

 

[tarheel96]

Well, I can explain the ammonia at least.

If your water contains chloramine, your water contains ammonia (NH3 + NH4). Chloramine is a combination of chlorine and ammonia. A reading of 1 ppm total ammonia from the tap is not uncommon for water containing chloramine. My water always reads ~0.75 - 1 ppm total ammonia from the tap and has a yearly average of 2.8 ppm chloramine.

How toxic 1 ppm total ammonia is to your fish depends mainly on two things: pH and temperature. The higher the pH, the higher the level of toxic ammonia (NH3). The higher the temperature, the higher the level of toxic ammonia (NH3).

*A one point increase in pH from say, 7.0 to 8.0, increases the level of toxic ammonia (NH3) 10 times.

That explains where the ammonia came from. If your water has chloramine, it has ammonia. If you don't know if your water has chloramine, simply testing the tap water for total ammonia with the api master test kit will tell you. If it tests positive for ammonia, you have chloramines.

*Not all water treatment plants report using chloramine, so testing your tap water for ammonia is the only way to know for sure.

What I don't understand is that treating the water with prime/safe breaks the chlorine:ammonia bond, removes the chlorine, and converts the ammonia into non-toxic ammonium (NH4), so the ammonia should have posed no threat to your fish.

Unless you didn't use enough safe (one teaspoon would be plenty for 200 gallons) I'm not sure what happened. I have heard that it can take up to an hour for prime/safe to 'detoxify' ammonia (bind the ammonia as ammonium (NH4), so this could be a possibility if your pH out of the tap is very high and especially with higher temperature, but I doubt it.

Sorry you lost your fish.

 

[narayanang76]

What was the PH reading before and after water change? variation of PH also can cause stress a fish and kill it.

 

[Def Leppard Hysteria]

Well, I can explain the ammonia at least.

If your water contains chloramine, your water contains ammonia (NH3 + NH4). Chloramine is a combination of chlorine and ammonia. A reading of 1 ppm total ammonia from the tap is not uncommon for water containing chloramine. My water always reads ~0.75 - 1 ppm total ammonia from the tap and has a yearly average of 2.8 ppm chloramine.

How toxic 1 ppm total ammonia is to your fish depends mainly on two things: pH and temperature. The higher the pH, the higher the level of toxic ammonia (NH3). The higher the temperature, the higher the level of toxic ammonia (NH3).

*A one point increase in pH from say, 7.0 to 8.0, increases the level of toxic ammonia (NH3) 10 times.

That explains where the ammonia came from. If your water has chloramine, it has ammonia. If you don't know if your water has chloramine, simply testing the tap water for total ammonia with the api master test kit will tell you. If it tests positive for ammonia, you have chloramines.

*Not all water treatment plants report using chloramine, so testing your tap water for ammonia is the only way to know for sure.

What I don't understand is that treating the water with prime/safe breaks the chlorine:ammonia bond, removes the chlorine, and converts the ammonia into non-toxic ammonium (NH4), so the ammonia should have posed no threat to your fish.

Unless you didn't use enough safe (one teaspoon would be plenty for 200 gallons) I'm not sure what happened. I have heard that it can take up to an hour for prime/safe to 'detoxify' ammonia (bind the ammonia as ammonium (NH4), so this could be a possibility if your pH out of the tap is very high and especially with higher temperature, but I doubt it.

Sorry you lost your fish.

We definitely have chloramine in our water. The utility company added it about 5 years ago and warned us in advance, so I was at least aware of that in the water from that point forward. That's kind of what I thought about getting the false positive of ammonia from the chloramines being converted over to ammonium via Seachem Safe. I pretty much double dose Safe before every water change, so I know I didn't short change the product.

Ph out of the tap was 7.6 and the tank water tested at 7.5 yesterday.

I'm leaning now toward the theory of our water contained lethal doses of chlorine, at least enough to do damage to the first two tanks. I'm guessing we would have lost even more fish from the first tank had they been smaller, like the lemon tetras in the second tank. Luckily I was able to move the 6 orange laser cories over from the 75 right as I noticed them tilting onto their sides. Unfortunately we lost 7 lemon tetras from the second tank and three emperor tetras from the first tank.

I've since tested the water in all three tanks this morning and the last two are reading 0 ppm ammonia, while the first tank is at .25 ppm ammonia. The first tank is a little cloudy right now, so I think the massive amounts of chlorine killed lots of the beneficial bacteria in that tank. I'm going to grab a few bags of Pond Matrix from the sump under our 300 gallon tank to help get the bacteria levels back up where they need to be.

Thanks everyone for the kind words.

 

[celebrist]

I'm glad it wa7sn't worse, still a bummer.

 

[Fish Tank Travis]

If you want to test for chlorine/chloramine, you should be able to get a simple pool test kit from a local pool store, or on Amazon.

I've heard of this but at the same time, I think it would have to be a lot of extra chlorine/chloramine because of how much dechlorinator you used. I'm sure there is already a buffer built into the amount advertised by the company to use, and since you used double, I would think it would have had to have been over three to four times the normal amount.

Very sorry for your loss. Keep track of the fish you lost and look up a market value for them so that you can seek reimbursement from the water company.

 

[Binge]

Sorry for your losses man.
We had an issue with our water about a year ago where because of ridiculous amounts of rain and runoff they added A LOT of chlorine to our water and I didnt do any changes for about 3 weeks so I only fed my tanks every few days. A coworker of mine did not know and wound up killing both his oscars with a water change.

 

[Tropical Joe]

Ok - I was just trying to help. A 20% water change is less stress on the fish. But like I said if your water parameters are showing Ammonia or Nitrite then yes I larger water change is necessary. Good Luck I hope things work out for you.

 

[Tropical Joe]

You Know there is always someone out there to ruin it. Its not even his thread and he is criticizing some one that is only trying to help out. He did not even read my post clearly. Which states ( for the third time) larger water changes if water parameters are bad. Sorry to be distracted from your topic. Again, just some people make it bad for everyone. Besides this nonsense I would like to say good luck with your tanks. I hope things work out for you.