Doing my weekly water change. Nitrates were between 20-40 which is normally where I do a change. 150 gallon tank set up for African Cichlids. Did fin level change which is my normal amount. Treated water from tap with fluval Aqua plus conditioner. Did everything exactly the same as I have done for as long as I can remember.
There is an ammonia spike and I don’t know why. Fish are not doing well. What caused this and is there anything that can be done to fix?
Maybe ur local water facility is adding some chlorine and/or chloramines to the water. Fortunately you can get some seachem prime and it’ll detoxify the ammonia.
So the good news is that overnight the tank has corrected itself. The ammonia has been removed but the tap water is still testing between .5 and 1 ppm. I did lose one fish last night but the rest seem to be ok but extremely skittish. Hopefully the rest pull through.
Any water supplier that uses chloramine as a disinfectant will will have tap water showing a slight level of ammonia.
Chloramine is produced by adding 1 part ammonia to 4 or 5 parts chlorine as a normally practice.
The average in my water supply was 0.02, depending on time of year, a contaminant source water (my suppliers source was lake Michigan). If your source is a river, or small reservoir, it may be more volatile.
If you have a reseasonble population of beneficial bacteria in your filter and tank, they will detoxify the ammonia fairly quickly. But......
This is one of the reasons why (because my water supplier used chloramine), I tended to do more smaller water changes throughout the week (30%-40% every other day), rather than one large one.
Chloramine is a very stable compound (much more stable and lang lasting than straight chlorine), and stays as a residual in the distribution system.
Choramine in combination with organic compounds, is also non carcinogenic (unlike chlorine and organics), and a supplier usually can use less to keep drinking water safe for humans (their primary mission)
Because of the problems with our local water system being expanded, and the resulting variable water quality at our tap, I'm going to invest in a large-capacity RODI system. Not just for the fish but for myself as well.
It's been a long time since I felt really comfortable drinking the local tap water anyhow.
We are doing some repairs right now and I have the roof stripped off, so it would be the perfect time to add plumbing.
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...
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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.
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.
