Fish dying in just 1 hour?

[andrewtyr]

If you are already impatient about loading fishes, you ought to think twice about going into planted. If plant growing does not test your patience, algae problems probably will. Behind every successful scape is a multitude of trials and errors. Keeping patience and avoiding needless mistakes keeps you going in the long run.

I only have an espei and a brigittae in my heavily planted 2ft, yet I feel very contented about my 5-year old setup.

[raglan]

actually, if the pH is below neutral, there is not any real danger from ammonia, in an uncycled tank.
I always use a sterilized tank and new filter for quarantine of imported South American fish.
Water changes remove waste, and I do large frequent WC.
A carbon filter is better than adding chemicals, IMO.
R/O is beautiful. I use R/O and carbon filtered tapwater together
To get lower pH, I use HCL, or Muriatic acid.
Danger: never add water to acid. always add acid to water. Wear protective googles, gloves, and keep baking soda handy.

Also, small tapwater WC without conditioner can be done for freshwater tanks, it's actually very good, but one should not introduce fish into 100% chlorinated water.
Dave

[AquaObsession]

I will not even apologize for being harsh, but I think you should not be keeping fish tanks if you do not have the patience. 1 hour Tap water, everything new, and you still add fish.

At least get some plants on woods from LFS wash it and put it in to help in, or get an old filter, or get anti chorine at least.

I have set up a new 3 feet tank, and it's been running for a week or so now, with an old filtration, some old substrate, and some plants. I still do not want to go buy my fish and shrimps. Only yesterday I put a molly inside to eat the oil layer at the surface.

[Juby23]

yes the wait can kill.. the first time i tried building a 2 ft tank, i ended up killing alot of tetras also... zen takes time to build.......

[oblivion]

take your time!
its supposed to be the slow old man's hobby - as my other half puts it
on average for new setups i add in the 1st fishes only after like 6 weeks

[Shadow]

Darn I'm an old man then

[raglan]

This is how I understand our water supply: when you use straight tapwater for percentage water changes, it is different than using it fresh in a fresh tank.
In an established tank with organic waste, the chlorine/chloramine reacts with the organics and is used up quickly.
In the case of chloramine, usually we have it in very low amounts anyway, just residual amounts.
At the water plant, the water is treated with chlorine, then that is mostly dispersed using slight under-dosing of sulphur dioxide or similar. It leaves just a remainder of the chlorine.
That remainder of the chlorine is then mopped up with a bit of ammonia, to form chloramine, with a small residual of ammonia left in the water .

However, when any work is being done on pipes, and various other events there may be stronger or local additions of chlorine - occasionally.

[Shaihulud]

I don't think our water supply has a little chlorine, it has alot! A whiff of the water from the tap will confirm it, I usually leave a new tank of water for 4 days to let the chlorine evaporate. I know that chloramine is tougher stuff, but I never had my fish have any problems with it. cycling can be done with feeder betta, they are the toughest fish I know.

[raglan]

From what I can understand, odour is not a sufficiently accurate indicator though

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ewh-semt/pubs...art2_1-eng.php

A recent cross-country survey of 1750 people in the United States examined public perception of chlorinous flavours in tap water and found that the majority of consumers were satisfied with their municipal tap water. However, taste was often the cause of higher consumer dissatisfaction, and the most common off-flavour reported in drinking water was "chlorinous" (15.5% for taste, 14.8% for odour) (AwwaRF, 2004). In this study, average threshold sensitivity to the taste of free chlorine was 0.82 mg/L, with 46% unable to detect free chlorine at the highest residual concentrations (~1 mg/L) in their household tap water.
Suffet et al. (1996) indicated that it is possible that chlorine odour problems are produced by other compounds and are not a result of the disinfection process. Although consumers may report a taste or odour problem as "chlorinous," it should be noted that they may be confusing chlorinous taste and odour with tastes and odours from CDBPs (AwwaRF, 2004). Thus, in many cases, it is difficult to accurately identify consumers' taste and odour problems based solely on their description of the tastes and odours.

[beetlejuice403]

Wow! Bro, 4 days is cool... If only I have the space/ containers to house the tap water for so many days without incuring the wrath of my wife.... Currently am only leaving the tap water overnight (or the most 2 nights if I can get an extended 'lease'... courtesy of my wife... )

Think Chlorine concentration will defer on slight level with different parts of Singapore (remember reading a thread on this & some bros had done some check before....). But guess it's still a more 'humane' method & thing to do to at least remove the chlorine in the tap water if don't have the time to age it... before adding any faunas into the tank... [Just my 5-cents worth...]

I don't think our water supply has a little chlorine, it has alot! A whiff of the water from the tap will confirm it, I usually leave a new tank of water for 4 days to let the chlorine evaporate. I know that chloramine is tougher stuff, but I never had my fish have any problems with it. cycling can be done with feeder betta, they are the toughest fish I know.

[raglan]

I use the carbon prefilters of my R/O unit to de-chlor tapwater, but there are still dissolved gases in the water which I like to allow to dissipate as the water warms up.

Sometimes I didn't allow any warm up but it was in lesser % WC, or I did the fillup in stages.

I had one small tank of fish die after a very large % , maybe more than 60 % WC using freshly carbon filter dechlorinated water

From what I understand, aging our water here won't remove the chloramines. So our options here are to dechlor treat it, or carbon prefilter it, or you can use it straight in smaller amounts fairly safely, especially if you monitor chlorine levels before you use it, just in case of unusually high temporary levels.

As the chlorinated water hits the dirty tank water, it almost immediately oxidizes the organics and is essentially not cholrine any more.
Some of the products are called toxic, but are also sanitizers much like furans.

But in a totally new tank, that won't happen. You have the chlorine and the dissolved gases.

[Shaihulud]

Its a really strong smell though, especially if it was run straight from the tap. Fish die quickly from that water. I reason that by 4 days, the greater part of the chlorine would be lost in the air. I use r/o water in my office tanks, mainly because its easy, my house tank is different. I have at most times about 4 pails of water sitting around.