Prime Concentrated Conditioner for FreshWater and Marine

[Myrkk]

Does anyone use the above as a water conditioner when they do water changes? If you do, have you had any issues with it? Whan I was water changing last week I thought ooo that smells sulphurous, don't remember it smelling like that before but thought it was my memory being poor. But then...

I started a thread a while ago about an issue I was having with my tank and eventually I put some bicarb in it and it helped a little. I lost several fish though. When I did a water change last friday the exact same happened, fish swimming head down, panting, looking very stressed, all parameters came back as you would expect them to be, nothing raised or out of the normal range. Bicarb and water changes, the bicarb helped a little but water changes made things worse. Then I realised the common denominator was the water change. So now I'm wondering if the conditioner is the issue. I've got some of the old stuff I used to use on order and will see if the next water change goes without hiccup but wondering if anyone had any thoughts. Does the above conditioner normally smell odd.

I should add it's a 200L tank and I used less than a capful of prime

 

[MaloK]

I don't know prime, but I'm positive that it should not smell like that...

I swear by Nutrafin Aqua Plus, for more than 30 years now...

I'm pretty sure that you don't put enough conditioner. Most of the time the dose must be doubled to deal correctly with Chloramine. The only times I had problems is when I didn't use enough.

Putting too much, does never hurt.

Not enough, You can kill your bio-filter and fall back in a cycling process, in addition to causing undue stress to all the fishes and give a hard time to the nice micro-organisms that keeps your tank sane.

A good trick to see of you use enough tap water conditioner is to run an ammonia test on the water after. If it shows any reading of ammonia. it has good chances that there are trace of Chloramine left.

Edit: Correction for the sulphur smell.

 

[Boundava]

Prime and Safe have a special smell. Have used both for over a decade without any issues. Matter of fact I just bought some more Safe after using 2 smaller containers for over 6 years and our last house had over 25 aquariums/stock tub from 5 gallons to 325 gallons with weekly WC of 30-50%.

Safe is a dry version of Prime and is even more concentrated and efficient.

 

[GaryE]

Prime stinks. That is normal.

I prefer other brands, but prime can be affordable, and is very concentrated. It doesn't have meaningless herbal (marketing) extracts or aloe, which is a positive. I often can't get anything else around where I am, and it's good.

But it has that sulphur side to it.

 

[AJ356]

I love the smell of Prime, and would be disappointed if they changed that.

 

[Essjay]

If you have chlorine rather than chloramine - not sure which Scottish Water uses - then next time get API Tap Water Conditioner. That is also very concentrated, for chlorine the dose rate is 1 drop per US gallon.

 

[Myrkk]

I used to use stress coat and never had an issue, swapped to prime on the prompting of the lfs. When I said I used less than a capful, it wasn't much less and I wasn't doing a 200l water change so probably did put more than required in. Will see if I can find out what is put into scottish water and see if there is anything different in this area. It's since we moved a couple of council wards over so it is more than likely different. Didn't have a single issue in our old council ward

Thanks everyone