Koi Fish Information Centre

See my blog article about Chlorine/Chloramine. It has a series of emails between me and one of the scientists at my local water utility explaining about what they actually report and what is actually in the water. The 0.5ppm ammonia is consistent with the ammonia that is found in chloramine. Ammonia could be coming from other sources besides chloramine, depending on the source of your water, since ammonia is one of the by-products of decomposing matter everywhere on earth.. just like in our tanks, cat-litter boxes, etc.
Ammonia in your water is the least of your worries since it will easily be converted to nitrite>nitrate by the nitrogen cycle. It’s all the other stuff that you have to worry about and treat for… chlorine, heavy metals, etc.
While your concerns for ammonia are warranted, since you are trying to cycle with fish, it’s not a level to worry about in a healthy fully cycled tank…. and it’s not even a level to worry about in a cycling with fish tank since it’s such a low level. If people would just fishless cycle like I stress so often, all of this would be mute.
While Cycling With Fish, YOU DON’T WANT ZERO AMMONIA until the cycling process has completed its cycle.. 2-6 weeks. If you don’t have ammonia, you’ll never get the proper nitrifying bacteria growing. You need 0.5ppm to 1.0ppm (depending on pH and temp) when cycling with fish so you can grow the N-bacteria and not harm the fish too much.
Dora said: “My research found that the bacteria that convert nitrites to nitrates will not work in the presence of ammonia, which is why nitrites don’t spike until after ammonia spikes.”
Your research is wrong or you misunderstood it. The bacteria that converts nitrite to nitrate works and lives alongside the bacteria that converts ammonia to nitrite. It comes out the fish as ammonia first (via Gill Function and Urine and decomposing waste), then is converted to nitrite, then to nitrate. In a fully cycled tank, there is a constant source of ammonia being converted to nitrite being converted to nitrate almost instantaneously on a constantly ongoing basis as the water flows through the filter media where the various N-bacteria mostly grow.
Since you have a high pH out the tap (9.0) and it then stabilizes to 7.4-7.6, you should NEVER do large water changes like you did today, right out of the tap. You don’t want to change the pH of the tank more than 0.2 at any one time so the fish will not suffer from pH shock. If you do a 25% PWC and the difference is 1.5, you are raising the pH by 0.375 which is nearly twice the recommended level. You might either have to start aging your water in 5G buckets so it outgases/oxidizes all of the buffers they are adding or do only 10% PWC’s on a more frequent basis with water directly from the tap. You could probably get away with a 25% PWC if you allow the refill process to take a long time so the fish aren’t hit with such a drastic change too quickly.
Lenny Vasbinder Fish Blog - http://GoldLenny.blogspot.com

Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society