Seachem Prime

[OldMan47]

I find that my tap water has about 1 ppm of ammonia because of the chloramine my district uses. To me that is meaningless. My test kit always shows about 1 ppm of ammonia in my tap water after I use my dechlorinator. About 3 hours after a huge water change I find my tank at zero ammonia. The biological filter has taken care of things. OK so where does that leave us? When a water change is first performed the ammonia levels reflect the amount my water district has added to my tap water (as a proportional part of the total tank water). A very few hours later my filter has dealt with the residual ammonia in my water and no ammonia is detectable. If I had no filter, I would need to rely on the ability of a water change to reduce the ammonia level below 0.25 ppm. If I do not have a cycled filter, I am in the position of someone with out a filter. The values I have seen for local cycled filters are not encouraging to me. Ultimately we each must do as we can to minimize ammonia and nitrite levels in our holdings.

 

[nanoMama86]

Okay. so what about someone like me who has 2ppm of ammonia out of the tap? I am in Texas and we are in the middle of a major drought and so I thought it was wise to test my water again and discovered this horrible fact. I use Prime. My 100 gallon has been having issues with itchy fish and clamped fins and only keeping 10-15 drops of quick-cure in has seemed to help. My clowns seem to not be bothered,which is strange, as i thought they were typically the canary's in the system. My oscar will scrape her skin off if i try to remove the quick cure. I am not seeing any parasites or thickenend mucus. My local lake is fighting a blue-green algae outbreak with a 80% native and fishery fish loss.

 

[CrustyOnEastCoast]

Seachem Prime is awesome! It has worked wonders for me. I have had disasters with other products.

I have close to 2ppm ammonia out of my tap as well, and a Ph of about 8!. Similar to OldMan47, my cycled filter seems to take care of things splendidly when I do my water changes. However, I haven't yet had a need to change more than 20% of the water at a time. To proactively minimize the potential for unexpected ammonia spikes, weekly I gravel vac all my sand substrate, as well as rinse out (in tank water) all the accumulated gunk from my filter sponges. I have separate porous, ceramic biomedia where most of the surface area housing the bacteria is internal, so I can safely rinse the outsides of this as well.

It seems to be working okay. I have never detected any harmful ammonia (factoring out ammonium -- I am able to distinguish between the two), or nitrites since adding fish about 3 months ago. My nitrates are about 40ppm right now.

However, I do fear the day if/when things get out of balance, and I have an emergency (out of town, and return to learn several fish died and tank registers high ammonia for example) and I am faced with the need to do a large water change.

In that situation, I don't know if my filter would be able to process through the 2ppm of ammonia resulting from a "100%" water change. Maybe if I carefully "cleaned" it first, it would.

One option, in that case, I could buy RO Water. I already have mineral supplements that I would need to add to it. I would have to carefully measure my existing tank water first .. so that I could match the water hardness precisely.