Afternoon all,
Living in South East London, I've traditionally battled high nitrate levels in my tap water. Today though, I have a rather different issue.
Having just filled a 200 litre bucket ready for tomorrow's water change on my 200 gallon, I dipped a test strip in. When testing my tanks I use a liquid kit but I use test strips occasionally prior to a water change to get a ballpark figure on what the nitrates are doing. Immediately it came up with not just the usual nitrate issue, but high nitrites.
I thought that was weird, so I went and got my liquid test kit. The tap water read as follows:
That looks to me somewhere between 2 and 5ppm nitrite. The legal limit for tap water in the UK is 0.5 but usually it's just zero. This was from my garden tap as I was preparing the water change for one of the tanks in my garden office but in the UK (and I assume elsewhere?) the garden tap runs off the cold water line from the indoor tap, so should have exactly the same parameters.
A bit concerned, given my 9 month old baby uses water from the tap, I went and tested the water from the kitchen tap.
That looks like a 0.25, which is within legal limits but still higher than the usual zero. Looks like I'm going to be lugging buckets from the kitchen to my garden...
I suppose I have two questions:
1. Any idea why there would be such a massive difference between the outside tap and the indoor one, given they come directly from the same cold water line? Taken 5 minutes apart so it isn't a time thing.
2. If 0.25 is coming out of my tap indoor, there's nothing I can do about that. My Seachem Safe dechlorinator should in theory "neutralise" the nitrite for a bit, although I'm always sceptical. If it does in fact neutralise it, then it should be ok as the plants/filter should do their job before it becomes toxic again, albeit it will likely result in higher nitrates.
I posted in March that an entire tank of mine got wiped out in an afternoon, with nitrites suddenly skyrocketing without any apparent reason (here). I'm now wondering if the water I was putting in was high in nitrite and I just didn't realise. I periodically test the water being prepared for a water change and every time I have done so previously, nitrite has been zero
Living in South East London, I've traditionally battled high nitrate levels in my tap water. Today though, I have a rather different issue.
Having just filled a 200 litre bucket ready for tomorrow's water change on my 200 gallon, I dipped a test strip in. When testing my tanks I use a liquid kit but I use test strips occasionally prior to a water change to get a ballpark figure on what the nitrates are doing. Immediately it came up with not just the usual nitrate issue, but high nitrites.
I thought that was weird, so I went and got my liquid test kit. The tap water read as follows:
That looks to me somewhere between 2 and 5ppm nitrite. The legal limit for tap water in the UK is 0.5 but usually it's just zero. This was from my garden tap as I was preparing the water change for one of the tanks in my garden office but in the UK (and I assume elsewhere?) the garden tap runs off the cold water line from the indoor tap, so should have exactly the same parameters.
A bit concerned, given my 9 month old baby uses water from the tap, I went and tested the water from the kitchen tap.
That looks like a 0.25, which is within legal limits but still higher than the usual zero. Looks like I'm going to be lugging buckets from the kitchen to my garden...
I suppose I have two questions:
1. Any idea why there would be such a massive difference between the outside tap and the indoor one, given they come directly from the same cold water line? Taken 5 minutes apart so it isn't a time thing.
2. If 0.25 is coming out of my tap indoor, there's nothing I can do about that. My Seachem Safe dechlorinator should in theory "neutralise" the nitrite for a bit, although I'm always sceptical. If it does in fact neutralise it, then it should be ok as the plants/filter should do their job before it becomes toxic again, albeit it will likely result in higher nitrates.
I posted in March that an entire tank of mine got wiped out in an afternoon, with nitrites suddenly skyrocketing without any apparent reason (here). I'm now wondering if the water I was putting in was high in nitrite and I just didn't realise. I periodically test the water being prepared for a water change and every time I have done so previously, nitrite has been zero
particularly as I often run them through an in-line nitrate filter which basically means it trickles through
