Chlorine and Chloramine... Again!

[whuntley]

C'mon guys.

You are making much too big a deal about cool temperatures. and not nearly enough about other aspects of good husbandry.

You have chloramines, so when I hear someone is dechlorinating their water, shivvers run up my spine. Brrrr! Are there people still doing that?

Ammonia will cause all kinds of gill, skin and egg damage, and to dechlorinate water containing chloramine is a sure way to poison the tank with a big burst of ammonium/ammonia. Unless pH is kept below 7.5 or so, the ammonia will horribly burn anything at all delicate -- like gills or eggs.

In the above posts, there was a clear description of what is called "cottonmouth disease" or columnaris infection. That is a very common result of either chlorine or ammonia burns. It also may indicate poor overall water cleanliness and inadequate water changes

I do believe that much of your problem is failure to deal with your local water chemistry, and what works for one part of the city will certainly be different in another. Learn the basics and figure out what you need to do to make it work in your local neighborhood.

I have bred BIT and BIVs and many other Chromaphyos at temperatures well above 26C, and BIV Funge refused to even spawn in such cold water! It had to be 25 or 26C or above before they even produced anything.

The coastal rainforest fishes of Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon all live right on the equator in mostly very slow-moving water. [The coastal shelf is pretty flat.] Much of it is quite soft, usually a bit acidic, but it is warm -- 23-26C, sometimes much higher. Most of the soluble minerals in rainforest soils have been soaked out by tens of thousands of years of heavy rain, leaving the water very low in tds and very soft, too. [They are not the same thing, BTW.]

You need to protect breeders and eggs from powerful oxidizers, like chlorine and chloramine and ammonia. There is no substitute for proper water treatment when the water supplier is trying hard to keep you from suffering from cholera and typhoid. Modern urban water policy avoids adding chlorine without any ammonium, for it tends to combine with organics in the water system to form carcinogenic trihalomethanes, like chloroform. When they add ammonium, the chlorine combines with it to form stable chloramine that is still a very good bacteria killer but lasts far longer in the system.

Use "Amquel" or "Prime" or "Ammo Lock 2" or equivalent formaldehyde-like dechloraminators. Never again even consider using the old dechlor products based on sodium thiosulfate (photographer's hypo). I have known them to kill entire fishrooms at water-change time! [Typical label hyperbole is "breaks the chlorine-ammonium bond!" Yeah, and where does that ammonium go? They never say.]

Be aware that aerating over night will do nothing at all to chloramine. It has a typical half-life of 5 weeks. You have 2 choices. Use a commercial de-chloraminator that ties up the ammonium, or use a very slow high-pressure activated-carbon filter. There are no known alternatives if you live in a city that wants to protect its citizens from disease.

I, personally, prefer the carbon filters, because the dechloraminators also kill all the beneficial infusoria that makes for such good first food for the smaller babies. Get a chlorine test kit so you can tell when to change the filter and to assure it is working properly. Refrigerator taste and odor filters are cheap and ideal for this use.

The subject fishes probably do better in softer water. It may be 99% myth, but Ca++ and Mg++ ions in the water (general hardness) supposedly interferes with hatching by toughening the egg chorion too much. Since I have bred everything from neon tetras to SA dwarf cichlids in water with a general hardness of 17 degrees (300 ppm as CaCO3 equivalent) or more, I tend to take such reports with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, I do think my BITs and BIVs have done somewhat better and produced more young when I used RO to dilute that hard water down by 50% or more. I'd make a general rule that GH should be 6 degrees or below for good results, maybe even a little lower for the highland species like Diapterons. OTOH, most Fp. loved that hard water!

The alkalinity, KH, should always be kept at about 4 degrees or above. This can be done with some baking soda, if you have measurable hardness, and you can add some "No Salt" (potassium chloride) sold in grocery stores for folks on low-sodium diets if the water out of your tap is really soft (GH below 1 degree).

Why all this? Good cell metabolism involves a whole host of reactions that are interactive results of the "essential electrolytes" in the water. If you have a little Ca++ and Mg++ (GH) and some Na+ and K+ (sodium and potassium ions) the water can support life. missing any one of those basic four and your water can become toxic to fish and eggs.

Two cheap kits are essential to knowing if your water is OK. Those are a GH kit and a KH kit. Tetra often packages them as a pair. A Ph meter and a conductivity (tds) meter can make life easy once you have the basics under control, but are less essential than the above.

1) You want low hardness (Ca++ and Mg++) in your water, but you do need some. [Pure distilled or RO water will kill most fish, slowly.] An amount of 4-6 degrees will usually be good. My tap water is about 3.5 degrees which supports most killies with little additives. Fish and plants all love it.

2) You can keep pH stable by simply having enough carbonates/bicarbonates in your water. Some comes in as part of the limestone/dolomites that gave you your hardness. The Ca and Mg often were originally dissolved as the carbonates and bicarbonates of those minerals

To just add sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) is usually all you need to do to raise KH to about 3 or 4. If your water has no potassium, the sodium becomes poisonous, so adding in some small amount of potassium chloride can prevent that. [If your plants are browning mysteriously, try adding some potassium to see if that is what is missing.]

Potassium and sodium become monovalent ions when dissolved (Na+ and K+) but don't register on a GH test. They do cause conductivity to rise, so knowing your GH and then measuring your total "tds" can let you establish a normal ratio that won't vary a lot in most water districts. Figure that 1 degree of hardness is about 18 ppm of tds. Measure GH and multiply degrees by 18 to get the ppm of equivalent CaCO3 hardness. Any excess tds is most likely due to sodium and potassium ions in normal tap water.

After a while, I just use the tds meter to know how much dissolved stuff is in my water, and can assume the ratio of total tds to that due to GH is pretty constant (if I'm not stupidly making my fish water into some kind of chemical soup by adding other chemicals).

If I check that tds is between 2X and 0.5X, and temperatures are close, I can move fish or eggs from one water to another with utter disregard of pH. The main impact of pH is to turn harmless ionized ammonium (NH4+) into molecular ammonia which is deadly in the extreme (threshold below 5 ppb). This happens as pH gets above 7.5 and is extreme at a pH of 9. My KH keeps my water buffered to about 7.6 or so and ammonia is of little concern, particularly in a planted tank. At a pH of 9, the percent of ammonium that converts to deadly ammonia is 50 times what it is at a pH of 7.

The final element to stopping the egg fungus is to remove or prevent the bacteria that kill the eggs. That action then lets fungus come along to do clean-up duty. Fungus alone never seems to harm eggs. It's just an opportunistic feeder that spots necrotic tissue quickly.

Plants support great numbers of rotifers, paramecia and other filter feeders. Those can remove most free swimming bacteria if the plants are well-lighted, fed and thus actively photosythesizing. Plants will also act as ammonium sponges to clean the water chemically. Dyes can be antibacterial, and we have all seen the benefits of weak mixtures of acriflavin and methylene blue. I even put small sprigs of Java Moss in egg-hatching Petri dishes, and I don't leave them in the dark!

Removing detritus, particularly dead bbs and other rich foods, is essential to keeping the water in good shape to sustain live eggs. What cannot be vacuumed should be trapped in a filter, where local resident bacteria can consume it.

There are many other aspects of good husbandry, but I have chosen to lean pretty hard on those I think cause the most certain defeat, and that tend to be mistaught at the LFS. If you pay attention to oxygen problems with warmer water, using deBruyn filters o/e, I think you can ignore your 30C+ tank temps. [I add airstones or ice cubes to anything much above that level.]

Wright

[timebomb]

Jianyang, Kee Hoe,

The regularity in which you 2 have been reporting casualties, I guess it's a matter of time before someone like Wright comes along and tell you a thing or 2 about fish husbandry. Frankly, it's been something at the tip of my tongue for a long time too.

Wright's post is rather technical and I'm sure he knows best but I still don't believe there's chloramine in our water. Singapore is so small we're just one big city. The water from our taps must be about the same, no matter which part of the island we live. When I change water, I often change more than half at one go. I never age the new water. It's always straight from the tap and into the tank. Slowly, of course.

As for temperature, I do agree with Wright that it couldn't be the cause of death. Aphyosemion prefer cold but not that cold, unless what you have is an A. elberti. I suspect it could be due to overcrowding. The rate at which you 2 acquire new fish, I don't know how you find the space to keep them

Loh K L

[stormhawk]

KL,

You'd be surprised at how small the number of species I currently have.

That said, I knew the first male died soon after I saw him near the water surface struggling, and the second died of dropsy. Had it anything to do with the water, the females would have long been dead too. I do water changes on all my tanks using the same water source. Had there been chloramine, I believe my snails and shrimps would have been the first to die off, but then again, that's my opinion.

The fish were given adequate care as per their requirements and were kept in very much the same way as how Ronnie keeps his. Why the deaths were confined to just the males, I really don't know. They were all fed the same diet and had a tank all to themselves.

With regards to the low egg production, I have no idea either. The fish were fed daily with a mix of tubifex and on occasions, newly hatched BBS to augment their worm diet. The females most certainly fattened up nicely and their colours are testament to this. I could only find maybe 2, or 3 eggs per week or in some cases, zero per week. Even then, fertility was nearly zero. The eggs laid never developed and fungused soon after.

[whuntley]

Jianyang, Kee Hoe,

The regularity in which you 2 have been reporting casualties, I guess it's a matter of time before someone like Wright comes along and tell you a thing or 2 about fish husbandry. Frankly, it's been something at the tip of my tongue for a long time too.

Wright's post is rather technical and I'm sure he knows best but I still don't believe there's chloramine in our water.

This is exactly the sort of "state of denial" that was common here about 10-12 years ago. Our EPA had mandated the change to chloramine, starting with larger municipal suppliers, and the tropical fish business was incredibly slow to catch on.

I personally knew two Betta IBC Grand Champions who wiped out their entire fishrooms because they were so sure their dechlor favorite product was all they needed. Bettas were hit worst, because they have a habit of 100% water changes on lots of small containers.

During the same era, I knew several killie keepers (famous ones!) whose fish fertility was dropped dramatically because they didn't know their city was adding chloramine to the water. Like you, they were so sure they had no chlorine they refused to buy a little $3 swimming pool test kit and check for chlorine!

They would have found the test positive, and could have then aerated for a day and still found the test positive for chlorine, proving their water had chloramine. Most kept losing fish and eggs rather than admit that they had poisons in their tap water.

One who didn't know what was wrong installed a whole-house carbon filter and was astonished at how his fish health improved and fertility suddenly skyrocketed.

Singapore is so small we're just one big city. The water from our taps must be about the same, no matter which part of the island we live. When I change water, I often change more than half at one go. I never age the new water. It's always straight from the tap and into the tank. Slowly, of course.

There are numerous postings here that prove that statement to be dead wrong. Different parts of the city get their water from widely different sources. The treatment is always dictated by frequent bacteria measurements in any modern system, so the amount of addition and changes in amount will vary wildly from one place to another within any larger city.

Partial water changes with chloramine present are usually not immediately deadly. 50% can be pretty risky, and 100% are to be avoided at all costs.

Until you tell me the reduced fertility and the deaths are in water that was treated with Amquel o/e or that you actually bothered to measure and found chlorine was less that 0.1 ppm, I will mark down what I am reading here as a repeat of what I observed in the SF Bay area in the early '90s.

It is so easy to test. It is also easy to talk to your local water supplier's engineers. That almost no one does this is absolutely amazing, to me.

Wright

[RonWill]

...but I still don't believe there's chloramine in our water. Singapore is so small we're just one big city. The water from our taps must be about the same, no matter which part of the island we live

Have you read this lately? I borrowed a test kit but since no one will believe what I see, I'll keep my trap shut but humbly suggest for those "to seek and ye shall find".

...and from those you won't argue with... "The residual chlorine present in tap water is in the form of chloramines or free chlorine"

Then again, we're all free to choose to believe that ignorance is bliss (until our killies start bellying up).

[RonWill]

oh, and I should mention that my Mathematics sucks, flunked Chemistry, never studied Electrical or Electronics, eye sight is screwed and I think funny when my fingers are dry. Maybe that's why no one believes me

[ruyle]

oh, and I should mention that my Mathematics sucks, flunked Chemistry, never studied Electrical or Electronics, eye sight is screwed and I think funny when my fingers are dry. Maybe that's why no one believes me

But then, who would listen to the mutterings of a madman, anyway?
How like Priam's daughter, Cassandra, who said "no boys, don't pull that
wooden horse inside the city walls!" and the rest, is history.

Bill

[whuntley]

Thanks Ron,

The references you cited make my point far more eloquently than all my verbiage.

Some (not all) Singapore water has chloramine.

Chloramine is very good for you, for preventing cancer and for stopping epidemics.

Chloramine, at very low levels, sterilizes/kills eggs making them fungus when they shouldn't, and sterilizes killifish. In concentrations above 1 ppm it can kill fish quickly. IME. Nothos are particularly vulnerable.

Treating chloramine with an old-style dechlor product releases a burst of potentially deadly ammonium/ammonia. [Safe if pH stays low. Deadly if pH is high. Don't risk it!]

A chlorine test kit costs only a few bucks, takes but a minute to use, and can give warning when your water treatment has changed. And it will change!

Most inverts react very differently to chlorine/chloramine, so they are not useful "mine canaries."

Bottom Line:

"Don't waste another penny on expensive fish or eggs until you know you can handle their water properly."

Wright

PS. I noticed no reported potassium in the water report cited by Ron. If it is truly low, adding salt or other sources of sodium (baking soda, for example) can make your plants turn brown and fish health to be marginal.

I'm no physiologist, but even I know that sodium and potassium work as a pair to cause/allow certain kinds of transport across cell walls. If one is totally absent, the other can become rather toxic. I have found Seachem's "Equilibrium" allows me to improve the electrolytes of too-soft water without undue disturbance of the water chemistry, otherwise.

[Scott_sg]

Hi,
Just to add to what Wright has been saying, you also need to be careful with what your chlorine test kit is really testing for. It is entirely possible to have a zero chlorine result and still have high chloramines. The swimming pool people are the real experts on this stuff and the test kits are much cheaper. There used to be three basic tests for chlorine and chloramines they used but I have not seen a swimming pool shop in Singapore.
I think the other reason why there is mixed results in Singapore is that from my understanding on top of each block the water is stored, so depending on the blocks water usage, it will effect the levels of chloramine in the water.
Chloramine can last a couple of months, and will really stay there reacting with everything in the water until it is all used up, that includes reacting with sperm, so the eggs don't really get a chance to be fertilized, hence the egg fungus. In this case the biochem of unfertilized eggs is very sensitive to water chemistry.
It can also play around with the water ph, that is why the water here comes out of the tap slightly alkaline, and then will drop. So that is another reason for the mixed results.
Activated carbon is a good way to get rid of the stuff if you don't like to use the proprietary water conditioners. You can always stick it in the oven to reactivate it within reason.
And to agree with Wright again, just adding sodium chlorine - table salt to the water can do a lot more harm than good. Get a bag a marine salt, there is lots around now after the "nemo" craze.
Also have to agree most problems tend to trace back to water quality somewhere along the line. Freshwater fish are generally very adaptable to environmental conditions, but ammonia and chlorine will finish them off very fast. In this case the problem is worse because it is subtle and slowly drags on for months, fertility problems, fungal infections and so on.
The easy way to check on any dead or dying fish, is to look for brown gills and any obvious lesions.
And one other thing chloramines will also affect any biofiltration you have going for the same reasons, effectively any free chloramine in your tank is a long term disinfectant.
I am one of those who suffered a fish room nightmare in the early 90's when the city I was living in changed over to using chloramines.

My 2c worth,
Scott.

[keehoe]

Jianyang, Kee Hoe,

The regularity in which you 2 have been reporting casualties, I guess it's a matter of time before someone like Wright comes along and tell you a thing or 2 about fish husbandry. Frankly, it's been something at the tip of my tongue for a long time too.

Wright's post is rather technical and I'm sure he knows best but I still don't believe there's chloramine in our water. Singapore is so small we're just one big city. The water from our taps must be about the same, no matter which part of the island we live. When I change water, I often change more than half at one go. I never age the new water. It's always straight from the tap and into the tank. Slowly, of course.

As for temperature, I do agree with Wright that it couldn't be the cause of death. Aphyosemion prefer cold but not that cold, unless what you have is an A. elberti. I suspect it could be due to overcrowding. The rate at which you 2 acquire new fish, I don't know how you find the space to keep them

Loh K L

Thanks Wright, i think the death of my fish were due to more physical contact with the pair. They were fine when they keep separately. But what you have explain sure helps in keeping our fish in good shape. I will keep that in mind especially when preparinging them for breeding.

KL, our water are from different location. Water in the west side is more "made" for industrial use rather than life support system. So if you do a test on the water. You will be surprise how toxic water in the west is.

Anyway, all water going into tank were through a double gang carbon filter. I hate to wait for a days for the water to be ready. So Carbon filter does the job.

I treat them the same way as with the diapteron. Except the PH which is much lower in Diapteron tank.

Aphyosemion is a big family, a few that i know such as AUS, STR, CYA, EXO, MIM, SJO and of course BIT. Their requirement can be quite different but, 25C should be OK for most.

Ya, feel bad that they die in my hands. Especially beautiful fishes such as STR and BIT. Felt defeated, but again not only we had difficulty keeping them.

[RonWill]

Treating chloramine with an old-style dechlor product releases a burst of potentially deadly ammonium/ammonia. [Safe if pH stays low. Deadly if pH is high]

PS. I noticed no reported potassium in the water report cited by Ron. If it is truly low, adding salt or other sources of sodium (baking soda, for example) can make your plants turn brown and fish health to be marginal

I know next to nuthin' 'bout biology but have taken to using a 3-module sediment/5micron-carbon rig (but it's out on temporary loan to someone in greater need)

Yesterday, a fellow forumer almost died of frustration trying to explain the effects of sodium/potassium (and sadly, none was retained by the grey matter), so I won't pretend to understand the lengthy bit you wrote earlier. Printed it for later digestion.

In the end, a blunt advise from my friend, "just get this!"

I'll let you figure out whatever is printed on the back label. Price-wise, it's a little more than I'm prepared to pay, so will marine salt do? It's usually a teaspoon into a low bio-load 'reservoir tank' whenever I top up. (same "Red Sea" marine salt used in my BBS hatchery)

The pH in my setups ranges between 4.0~7.0 but FWIW, the temperature issue is real. I'll prove it when I have the necessary facilities.

SIDE NOTE:
Jian Yang, please split the chloramine discussions and join to "Chloramine and suggested treatment".

[timebomb]

It's not that I'm in self-denial but you can't blame me for being skeptical. I took a look at the link Ronnie mentioned but even before I read what was said on the main site, I was already even more skeptical after I read the introduction. If chloramines had been in our water since 1993, we should have seen many more "total wipe-outs" by now. If chloramine is as lethal as many of you alleged, why isn't this happening?

Anyway, to put an end to the argument, I bought a chlorine test kit a few hours ago.


I've never used one before so I had to read the instructions. They're pretty straightforward actually. Fill up the vial with 20 ml of tap water. Then add 8 drops of the reagent.



Cap the vial and give it a good shake. Remove the cover and check the result immediately. Place vial on a white surface and observe from above. If no colour change occurs, the water does not contain chlorine. Harmful chlorine contents from 0.02 mg/l will result in yellow coloration, with higher chlorine contents the colour will change into reddish.


After about 10 minutes, the view from above:


So, what's next?

It's not like I'm mad or anything but some of you are really rather preachy. You seem to think people are in self-denial or ignorant just because they don't believe what you say. You just can't stomach disagreements. I've never believe there's chloramine in my water for the simple reason that if it's there, I would have suffered total wipe-outs many times. I've kept fish since 1974, for christs' sake. Often, I change more than two-thirds of my water at one go. It's not that I have never lost fish before but fish die for many reasons. Besides over-crowding which I suspect is the main cause of death in many cases, there's also over-feeding. Fish are healthiest when they are kept hungry but many of you raise them like gluttons. In their natural habitats, fish get very little food. More often than not, it's just enough. Rarely, would fish in the wild get to feed everyday like the kind of feeding regime they get in our tanks. Ours are pampered fish, raised with tender loving care. But that turns them into wimps, that die instantly from the first sign of ill-health.

I said on my main site that sometimes, a bit of neglect helps. I still think that's true.

Loh K L

[ruyle]

KL,
Does your housing complex have its own water filtration system? Curious,
can't imagine not having something in the water to safeguard bacteria. At
a clinic in Nevada where I worked we had a $40,000 multi-stage filtration
system for our drinking fountains and treatment rooms! And there was no
chlorine/chloramine in it after run through such a system. The tapwater
was terrible with heavy metals, cyanide, etc.

Bill

[whuntley]

It's not that I'm in self-denial but you can't blame me for being skeptical. I took a look at the link Ronnie mentioned but even before I read what was said on the main site, I was already even more skeptical after I read the introduction. If chloramines had been in our water since 1993, we should have seen many more "total wipe-outs" by now. If chloramine is as lethal as many of you alleged, why isn't this happening?

Because it is only very rarely lethal. At levels useful for stopping epidemic, it can reduce fertility, and degrade the health of the fish a little bit. Many eggs will be infertile, possibly because it kills sperm at those levels. Symptoms are most subtle and not at all obvious on the fish, themselves.

Fishroom wipeouts usually require three coincident factors:

1. Unusually high chloramine dosages -- 2.5-3 ppm in one case I followed.

2. 100% water changes. Betta brood stock are often kept in individual small jars and 100% water changes are normal. [They and Nothos seem more sensitive.]

3. High pH.

EPA mandated high pH in areas where copper pipes had been used a lot. It keeps lead from solder joints and copper from the pipes from etching and showing up in human baby blood, for example.

Ammonium, from using a dechlor product on chloramine is quite harmless at low pH. It just nicely feeds the plants. Enough of it converts to toxic ammonia at pH over 8 to be lethal to smaller and more sensitive fish. Then, and only then, does the mistreatment of chloramine appear to be lethal.

A single test for chlorine doesn't tell one a thing. The use of chloramine is usually tailored to the coliform bacteria count in the water. That can be zero in "newater" if processed through an RO filter. Changes in source or mixing during shortages can change things quite a bit. During the drought in the late '90s, the treatment of SF water was drastically altered, and customers, on the SF peninsula, had real problems with killy fertility and some mortality due to getting water with chloramine and no warning.

I did a long and too-preachy note on why the secrecy about chloramine, but wiped it out by hitting the wrong button. Basically, in the US, anyone with "deep pockets," admitting any change to a process will be sued by our over-active trial lawyers. No city wants to compensate every cancer victim because, for years, they were using chlorine instead of chloramine. Admitting the change is just too risky.

Wright

[timebomb]

Oh, but the culture here is different, Wright. We know that lawsuits are not uncommon in the USA but over here, no one sues the government. Period. When there's sueing, it's always the government who doing that.

The ornamental fish industry is a million dollar business. I would concede that the government here could possibly care little for hobbyists like us and likely, even less for our fish but I seriously doubt they would do anything to undermine the economy by not warning fish farms/shops/importers/exporters about the lethal effects of chloramine.

I called my good friend, Edward this morning to ask him for his opinion. Edward who's on good terms with many fish shop owners said 99% of all such owners use water directly from the taps.

I later visited Karin Leow of Far East Aquatic's and she says she uses anti-chlorine in her tanks. I asked her for permission to test her tap water and she agreed. The results were negative. There was not a single trace of chlorine in the tap water in her shop.

It did occurred to me when I bought the test kit that it may not be quite reliable. I would have bought the same test kit from different brands if they were available. But I only managed to find the Sera one. Could it be then that the test kit wasn't working at all?

I asked Edward and he said it's possible. After all, who ever buys chlorine test kits? The ones sold in fish shops must have been left on the shelves for years. To find out, Edward said, we can use bleach. A drop of bleach in 20 ml of water should contain enough chlorine to be detected by the test kit. So that's what I did.

I got a bottle of bleach from Karin.


Here's what the label says:


I added a drop of the bleach into 20 ml of tap water from Karin's shop. The instructions on the test kit were that I should add 8 drops from the reagent. This is what happened after I added just one drop.


I suppose the results show the test kit is reliable. If that's the case, there's no chlorine, let alone chloramine, in the tap water in my house as well as Karin's shop. As for the water in your tap, you have to buy a test kit yourself to be sure.

Loh K L

[Scott_sg]

To throw in my 2 cents, testing for chlorine and chloramine are different. You need to make sure the test kit says chloramine, or as a last resort an ammonia test kit "might" pick up some chloramines depending on the reagents.

The practical difference between chlorine and chloramine is that chlorine is an instant "hit", it will damage stuff and then dissipate fast. Chloramine is a slow release, and that is the reason why water boards prefer it now.

It wont kill fish immediately like water straight from the tap used to, but it will cause fertility problems and fungal infections, since it is slowly releasing chlorine and ammonia until it has all reacted away.

It also causes some weird ph swings, and under the right ( or wrong ) conditions it will crash a system since as the ph increases more of the chloramine will disassociate to chlorine and ammonia, which increases the ph and sets up a fast chain reaction which keeps producing ammonia and chlorine until all the chloramine is used up. Then the ph will crash back down as the ammonia and chlorine dissipate or are nitrified.

Could be wrong but that is my rough understanding of the chemistry.

Scott.

[timebomb]

KL, Does your housing complex have its own water filtration system?

No, Bill, it does not. I live in a flat which is 12 storeys high. On the roof of the block is a water tank. It's used only for holding water and as far as I know, there's no filtration system. The water is pumped up via stainless steel pipes. Floors from 6th storey and higher get their water from these tanks. The units on lower floors get their water from below, through pipes.

I'm quite sure there's chlorine in the water when it leaves the reservoirs. But during the time it is held in the water tank, the chlorine evaporates. Over the years, I've met a couple of Discus breeders who regularly change almost 100% of the water in their tanks everyday. I'm not exaggerating. It's almost 100% because just before they put the new water in (straight from the tap), the fish are flopping about on their sides at the bottom of the tank.

Loh K L

[timebomb]

To throw in my 2 cents, testing for chlorine and chloramine are different.

But Wright says to test for chloramine by testing for chlorine, Scott. If I leave the solution in the vial to stand overnight, would the chloramine which you say is a slow-release chemical, show up?

Anyway, I've already completed the first task Wright suggested, which is to get a test kit to check for chlorine. Now he tells me one test isn't good enough. So how many times do I have to test the water? Anyway, to appease him further, I carried out the second task a few hours ago. I called the PUB (Public Utilities Board) and spoke to someone there. I don't know if he's an engineer but he sounded quite knowledgeable.

Firstly, he stressed many times we have nothing to worry about. He confirmed that chlorine has been replaced with chloramine many years ago but for some reason, the western part of Singapore did not get chloramine in their water until the 19th of October 2005, almost exactly a month ago. A few months earlier, the PUB made calls to all fish shop/farm owners in the western area to warn them of the impending change. This was later followed up with letters. I asked for a copy of the letter to be sent to me but was turned down.

Just as what Wright taught us, the officer said that to test for chloramine, test for chlorine.

So I asked him why I couldn’t detect chlorine in my tap water? He replied that the amount of chloramine in our tap water depends very much on the distance between our house and the water works station. The further you are from the water works, the less chloramine there is in your water. He said the water from my taps comes from Woodleigh water works, which is about a few miles from where I live. He also said it’s actually a waste of my money to buy the chlorine test kit if I never had problems with mass die-offs in the first place. Maybe I should ask Wright to give me back my money.

During our conversation, the officer speculated that our fish could have somehow evolved or conditioned themselves to withstand the lethal effects of chloramines. Frankly, I don’t believe this but he was just speculating. It isn’t a statement from the PUB, mind you.

When I asked him why there wasn’t a public announcement, he mentioned that the replacement of chlorine with chloramine was carried out many years ago. He couldn’t remember if there was a public announcement but he said they prefer to do this discreetly (with phone calls and letters) so as not to alarm the general public.

So there you have it, folks. Do you have anything to worry about? Frankly, I don’t know but the officer insisted several times that if you have never experienced mass die-offs in your tanks, there’s no necessity to worry about chloramine. I've already done all I can to find out for sure if there's chloramine in our water. As far as I know, there's none in mine. I don't know about yours.

Loh K L

[whuntley]

KL,

Why do you keep referring to massive die-offs? They are, of course, possible but highly unlikely with chloramine in your water at modest levels.

The likely result, in most situations, is eggs that fungus too much, and generally unhealthy but mostly surviving fish. More deaths than normal and too many opportunistic diseases are common side effects. Temporary sterilization is very common, but I'm not aware of permanent sterilization happening. Difficulty growing out babies is a probable effect, too.

Massive die offs are when one ignorantly uses hypo to treat the chloramine, changes most of the water all at once, and releases a burst of ammonia in high-pH water. This typically happens when chloramine is at a really high level -- 2.5 ppm or more. It usually takes all four conditions for a fishroom wipeout. That is highly unlikely for our killies, to say the least.

[I know one PhD chemist who routinely uses hypo to treat his change water. His water is soft and has moderately low pH, he changes only modest amounts at any one time, and his chloramine levels are not unusually high. He has an excellent reputation as a killy breeder. I wouldn't do it, but he gets away with it.]

Chloramine and chlorine test exactly the same, if you use the usual dye indicator test. I don't know of any special test for chloramine. It is easy to repeat a positive test after 24 hours and see if the chlorine still tests positive. If so, you have chloramine. If the test reads zero after 24 hours of aeration (but was higher at first), you had chlorine but no chloramine. Simple.

Retesting would be called for if you think things have changed at the water works. Unusual egg failures, or signs of respiritory distress in the fish should send one scurrying for the chlorine test kit. If you detect an increase in your water, quickly dosing with Amquel o/e will relieve the stress on the fish and make future eggs fertile.

If you use a carbon filter in your incoming water line, a periodic check to be sure no chloramine is "punching through" is advisable. I always used two filters in series, with a tap between. After about 6-8 months, the water from the tap would test positive for chlorine, so I threw away the first filter, replaced it with the essentially unused second one, and put a new cartridge in the second filter container. Chlorine, chloramine and ammonia are only very weakly attracted to activated carbon, so very slow flow is required. I always trickled water into a storage barrel so there was a long contact time with the carbon. Again, testing for chlorine can tell you if the flow is too fast (assuming your water does test positive for chloramine/chlorine).

As you can see, there are many uses for the chlorine test, so I won't pay you for what your test kit cost. In fact, when I saw the brand, I groaned, for that test kit probably costs about 30 times what a normal chlorine test kit costs at the pool and spa department of the hardware store. I buy 1 oz of test solution in a dropper bottle for US$0.78 at Home Depot. If I want the test chart and a test tube (I never do), it costs about $3. The Sera kits run over $10 as I recall, and it probably has a lot less than 1 oz. of reagent, too.

Letting the test tube stand over night will not change the test, for the kit reads chloramine exactly as if it was chlorine. I do not agree with Scott, here, as I have never seen a test kit specifically made for chloramine. There may be such a thing, but not in this country, AFAIK.

If you let water stay around for 5 weeks or so, it will test as having about half as much chlorine, because that is the half-life of chloramine on average. Your water guy was wrong about the distance having an effect on how much chloramine you will get. That used to be very true for chlorine, but chloramine stays full strength to the end of many miles of pipes (unless it takes months for the water to traverse them). What is happening is that your water gets very little or no chloramine because the bacteria count doesn't call for it RIGHT NOW! That does not mean they will not increase the amount if they get a higher count next week. Watching your fish and eggs for signs can clue you to test your water if you think things have changed. Keep the Amquel handy.

BTW, I keep referring to Amquel instead of Prime, Ammo Lock 2, etc., because I believe it has a much longer shelf life. Those are the three I have tested extensively, so cannot say about some of the more recent dechloraminators (many are snake oil, when you read the label). I only use Amquel a tiny bit for shipping water, so I need something that lasts a long time. [I don't believe Amquel 2 handles chloramine well, but I could be mistaken on that. It is cheap to make and Kordon owns that name.]

On ammonia tests:

Most aquarium-trade ammonia/ammonium tests are useless for chloramine testing. The first step on their sensitivity scale is usually about 250 ppb. Fish are stunted and babies are permanently damaged at ammonia levels of about 5 ppb, so the tests just don't have enough sensitivity to be useful. I have quit using them entirely, and watch for signs of gasping, etc. to warn me that ammonia might be a problem. A squirt of Amquel or a sudden lowering of pH (peat extract, vinegar, etc.) with some water change will usually solve such problems.

Wright

[Scott_sg]

Ok to be a smart&** again..

There is the simple answer..
The box KL is using shows Cl test kit, and then something is obviously not right if you are not getting any result. That implies that the water has no disinfectant at all which I would doubt.

Searching the net also results in thousands of links on the issue..

"Testing for chloramines. If you're testing for chloramines, make sure the test kit you've borrowed is testing for "total chlorine" or "combined chlorine," not for "free chlorine." A test for "free chlorine" would misleadingly read zero in chloraminated water. "

http://www.skepticalaquarist.com/doc...chlorine.shtml

Any lab company will have a range of chlorine test kits, swimming pool companies and so on, and the test kit for free chlorine is very different.

http://www.thomassci.com/product/26161

More complicated answer:

Free chlorine Cl2 is chemically very different to chloramine, which is essentially ClNH3 although there are different species. The properties of this are much closer to Ammonia than Chlorine, that is why in analytical chem labs they have to be careful of the results when testing for ammonia. And that is why a good Ammonia test kit will pick up some chloramine.

Although admittedly the average aquarium test kit is crap, and it is no way for testing for chloramine, but the point is an ammonia test will have a better chance of detecting chloramine than a free chlorine test.

Lamot (?) I think is the main manufacturer of the commercial reagents used, and in the States, I think it is Jungle Lab (??) or something similar sells chlorine/chloramine test kits - but I have no idea how good or bad they are.

Mass die offs in my opinion are really a combination of things, but my own feeling is simply that at the high water temperatures here, water conditions and pathogens spiral out of control very fast overwhelming fish. After all in microbiology labs for non human bacteria the optimum temperature is around 30C - so a tank can make a great incubator at that temp and above.

Chloramine is a pain rather than a disaster, Like Wright said - it will be all little odd things fungused eggs and so on..

My 3.14 cents worth..

Scott.