More & More Cases of Fishes Deaths After Water Change

[fishking]

Hi

Are you guys see a trend of having more and more people like us like ahdi, Christoph3r L1m, myself included, who does water changes like what we did before in the past and overnight, majority of the fishes just passed away for no rhyme or reason recently??..or the fishes which are healthy 1 day, and after a simple WC, the fishes start gasping for air at the water surface??

This is even more puzzling when we have already added anti chlorine, anti chloramine, let the water aged for 1 day etc..(routine things that we have been doing for ages), but yet the fishes died on us.

LFS owners I have spoken to past few months, they also encountered such problems and also heard stories of how whole tank of healthy fishes died overnight after a water change. PH can be as low as 2.9!!!!! For those of us encountering such things, measure your PH once such things happen. You will be very shocked at the PH readings.

I am not saying that every water change will result in this, sometimes it happens after 10 WC and the 11th WC is no different from the earlier 10 WC, but then result is devastating.

I really want to know the answer. Imagine if fishes were to die from additional chemicals added in tap water, then I shudder to think that I will be safe from drinking the tapwater directly.

[freshfish]

hey , i normally age my water for like 1 week or longer . maybe you wanna try that ?

never had problems with WC .

[freshfish]

thats also one reason why i never drink from the tap ... we order distilled water at home .... maybe can use for our scaly friends too

[illumnae]

It could be the recent rainy weather that's affecting the amount of chemicals being added into our water supply. PUB does not pur a fixed about of chloramine and other chemicals into the water supply, it's variable based on the water coming in from the reservoirs. I've been told that on heavily raining days, the amount of chloramine is increased due to the debris stirred up in the reservoirs due to the rain and in the extreme dry seasons, more newwater is added to the supply due to the drop in level of the reservoirs. All this might result in variable conditions that may affect your fish, especially if you're dosing just enough antichlorine to neutralize the chloramine on a normal day, and the next day it rains and PUB increases the amount of chloramine to the supply. I learnt the hard way and lost many valuable fish just due to 1 super rainy day. I now overdose my antichlorine at all times.

[quix]

How about changing water more often but at lower amounts? Then can reduce the impact of such issues.

[freshfish]

It could be the recent rainy weather that's affecting the amount of chemicals being added into our water supply. PUB does not pur a fixed about of chloramine and other chemicals into the water supply, it's variable based on the water coming in from the reservoirs. I've been told that on heavily raining days, the amount of chloramine is increased due to the debris stirred up in the reservoirs due to the rain and in the extreme dry seasons, more newwater is added to the supply due to the drop in level of the reservoirs. All this might result in variable conditions that may affect your fish, especially if you're dosing just enough antichlorine to neutralize the chloramine on a normal day, and the next day it rains and PUB increases the amount of chloramine to the supply. I learnt the hard way and lost many valuable fish just due to 1 super rainy day. I now overdose my antichlorine at all times.

hi , why dont you try ageing your water instead ?

[illumnae]

Aging isn't much use with chloramines I believe that whatever can be cleared with the antichlorine (which removes chloramines too) will be cleared by chemical reaction, so aging doesn't make a difference. Now that I've made it a habit to always overdose the antichlorine, I've had no issues with water changes even on heavy rain days.

[blue33]

So far i use Nutrafin Antichlorine/Chloramines, 2 capful follow by straight tap water into my 2ft tank, none of the fauna including shrimp die on me yet, btw i change 50-70% water weekly. Rain or no rains still the same. Oh... i drink RO water.

[khtee]

Perhaps it is only affecting certain places in Singapore. Hope that anyone can indicate your location if anyone encounter any fish dies after WC problem recently so those that those live near the area will take extra pre-cautious on this.

[k3nlim]

Refering to a ST newspaper article several weeks ago, it stated that the water in the western part of Singapore have higher level of chloramines in them.So do take note

[Shadow]

o...really, can we confirm that those who experience fishes death after WC stay on the west?

[meerkat]

Did a 20% WC on Sunday with tap water and so far 1 glowlight tetra, 1 corydora and 1 SAE died on me. I have never had any deaths for the past 6 months after each weekly WC with tapwater.

Something could be wrong...

[juggler]

I am at NTU. So West area.

Last evening changed 50% water in the 3.5ft planted tank. Did not add anti-chlorine as usual. So far no deaths or strange events observed. There are approx 70 neon tetras, 4 rams, 8 pencifish, 3 ottos in there.

Will post if anything strange happens at next WC.

Cheers!

[freshfish]

Aging isn't much use with chloramines I believe that whatever can be cleared with the antichlorine (which removes chloramines too) will be cleared by chemical reaction, so aging doesn't make a difference. Now that I've made it a habit to always overdose the antichlorine, I've had no issues with water changes even on heavy rain days.

really ? doesn't it harm the fish ?

[PeterGwee]

Didn't have any issues with 75% water change last Saturday. I would look at how folks setup their tanks and what they are doing before blaming the water supply.

Regards,
Peter Gwee

[illumnae]

really ? doesn't it harm the fish ?

Most antichlorine solutions can be overdosed to a certain degree. For example, Seachem Prime I believe does state on their bottle that up to 5x the recommended dosage can be dosed for emergency disposal of ammonia. Certain antichlorines also recommend double dosing to encourage the growth of the fish body slime...which means at the very least they can be dosed to 2x recommended dosage safely.

Didn't have any issues with 75% water change last Saturday. I would look at how folks setup their tanks and what they are doing before blaming the water supply.

I didn't have any issues with a large water change (>70%) last Saturday too. I would still say that generally speaking, our water supply is very good. I only blame the water supply when several independent tanks all encounter the same problem on the same day with the only common factor being a water change done that day on all the affected tanks. The other tanks at home that did not have a water change on that day were not affected (thus minimizing the chance that it was something airborne that affected my tanks). Granted, it's not a 100% chance that the water supply was the cause, but I'd say it's a very high chance.

Even so, to me, it would only be the issue of extra chloramine in the water that my own previously comfortable dosage of antichlorine did not handle (e.g. previously .5ppm, on that particular day it's 1ppm and thus I had .5ppm not neutralized and remaining in the water. Exact figures are not known, just a ballpark) which thus affected my fish. Knowing that our government is very cautious, it's most likely that the increased dosage of chloramine was still well within the figures published by PUB and I simply did not dose enough chloramine to account for it. I've had zero problems after increasing my antichlorine dosage.

[Chr1stoph3r_L1m]

After what happen, I'm changing my routine,
Since it's a 1ft tank, everyday when I reach home, I'll pour out 2L water and top up the water level back to the tip of the HOF.

Here’s my post on what happen.
quaticquotient.com/forum/showthread.php?t=47096

Ignore my sms text please. ha ha

[EvolutionZ]

i just did 50 % WC to my coasta island tank yesterday.. no death at all till now.. i only age my water for 2 hours with genesis anti chlorine and chloramine.. but i tend to over dose.. like example that red tub should drop only 5 - 6 drops.. i usually go up to 8.

[fishking]

Hi all..thanks for the replies.

What I am trying to drive here is that obviously there are some chemicals which PUB puts in is very very harmful to fishes.

Ageing of water is not practical for me. I have two 2ft tanks and one 6ft tank. So you can imagine if I need to fill in more than 10 pails of water to let it aged. So it is not practical. And furthermore, chloramine will not dissipate into thin air even in aged water. It is very unlike chlorine.

I am not saying that every water change will kill off fishes. We can be doing water changes for many times before a major tragedy strikes the fishes even though every single water change is exactly the same.

I have lost thousands of baby fishes over the past 1.5yrs and I really am very pissed off. Also sometimes I have been changing water for a few weeks and the baby fishes would have grown to a certain size, then 1 fine day, same water change and all my sub adult baby fishes go to heaven.

Sometimes my adult goldfish can be healthy in the morning after a water change, then by the time I come back from work, all the goldfishes will be coated with a slimy mucus on their fins and body and all gasping for air and also couple of them will develop cloudy eyes.

An immediate change of water after that will see the goldfishes go back to healthy state in a few hours time. So you can see that there is not a fixed time for us to grasp the culprit.

Any PUB workers here who will like to explain. I am going to write in to ST forum.

[Interestor]

i too face angel graps for air after WC, either i double dose water conditioner or just increase the aeration. the following days the angels will be fine. no casualites so far.


CHeers..