Really sorry to read about this. You might want to read this:
This subject came up recently in another discussion & I felt that it deserved its own thread. Hopefully it will help give some members a better understanding about water conditioners in general, and more importantly help save them some of their hard earned money. The only way that...
www.monsterfishkeepers.com
We have had chloramine treated tap water here for a couple of decades, and aqua-plus does not detoxify or remove chloramine. It simply breaks the chlorine/ammonia bond (if enough is used) leaving the free ammonia behind. Free ammonia (NH3) is toxic to fish, and when performing large water changes, such as you did (fin level) I always advise using a water conditioner such as Prime, Safe, etc, that will actually bind or reduce the resulting ammonia spike, into a fish safe form.
A good read on the toxicity of ammonia and fish can be found in the following article posted on the krib.
http://www.thekrib.com/Chemistry/ammonia-toxicity.html
Experiments have shown that the lethal concentration for a variety of fish species ranges from 0.2 to 2.0 ppm.
Experiments have shown that exposure to un-ionized ammonia concentrations as low as 0.002 ppm for six weeks causes hyperplasia of gill lining in salmon fingerlings and may lead to bacterial gill disease. At higher levels (>0.1 ppm NH3) even relatively short exposures can lead to skin, eye, and gill damage in some species.
Obviously free ammonia (NH3 ) is toxic to fish. How long that toxin will remain in one’s tank, and how toxic it will be, will be dependent on a number of factors. Temperature of water, pH value of water, planted tank vs non-planted, size of biological filtration, whether the biological filters are well established, or not, size/volume of water change, species of fish, life stage of fish, etc. There are a LOT of variables involved.
