OK, last night I was a little suspicious about my always raging Nitrate readings, especially in tanks I had changed just a few days ago. So I decided to test the tap water with my API test kits. The tap water was (-) for nitrite, had .5 ammonia and the Nitrate was 40ppm. I had replaced the ammonia kit about a month or so ago, but had been using the same nitrate kit since this summer. So I figured that all my Nitrate agony had been over nothing. This morning I went to a pet store to have all my tanks tested. The goldfish had 20 ppm Nitrate, one of my tropical tanks had a little nitrite, and all the tanks had .5 ammonia.

Then she tested the tap water - it came out to have .5 ammonia. The petstore does use test strips, but to have it corroborate a fairly new drop test kit makes really concerned about our tap water.

Does anyone have suggestions about this?

S

I used to use those API kits but stopped when my nitrates kept reading 80ppm This was in my saltwater tank to.. I have coral and anniones .. they were just as happy as could be.. so I got suspicous.. well I went through 4 API kits.. come to find out the Nitrate tester was bad all the kits to.. I had my water tested with strips and since then that's what i use.. I get mine from wally world and they work great.. I just dont trust those API kits..

You can use PRIME to bind it when you add it to your tanks. Maybe double dose. If your tap is zero nitrite/nitrate, then that should be all you need to do. But I'd keep an eye out for varying degrees of ammonia. It means your city uses chloramines in your tap water.

I wonder to what extent the weather affects the tap water on a day to day basis. That is, depending on water sources used by the Water Company, the volume of recent rains (or lack thereof) might affect not only the natural source water mix, but the level and composition of chemicals used for treatment. I know that several Water Companies in our area use river and creek water that is significantly effected by rain water run-off. Given environmentally sensitive situations like fish tanks, the potential for sneaky catastrophies in an unguarded moment is enormous

Oliver

Well, I enough Prime to put 5 ml in each of my three tanks. After a couple hours, the fish in the tropical tanks still looked peaked, so I bought some more Prime and did a partial water change on each of them. This time, I treated the the new water, instead of putting it in the tank and then adding the new water. It really seemed to help. I agree that this could be a seasonal thing, I just wish I knew when it started happening.

By the way Jewels I completely sympathize with your horror at the API nitrate kits. I guess the false readings had a lot to do with why my snails are going gangbusters and the plants are not.

I also Have .5 ammonia in my water.

Hi Scruffy - just to clarify something, can you confirm whether or not you were adding the Prime after you'd added the new water to the tank?

Like Lola says, when municipal water is treated with chloramine as a disinfectant it will give an ammonia reading as it is chlorine bound to ammonia. Prime should easily detoxify the levels you report and so if you are registering an ammonia and nitrite presence in your tank it may be possible that the cycle has been disrupted in some way.

Maybe you could post back with your PH readings - tank and tap - and tell us a little more about your set-up; how many gals, what type of filtration, how many fish and how much/often you change water?

Regarding test kits, I think strips are not good. When you consider that even the drop kits we can buy are only considered 'hobby level' accuracy, the strips are even less reliable and can also be made useless by any exposure to humidity or moisture. The API nitrate seems to begin reading false/postive after a while and for that reason I switched to Tetra.
Update us when you can and maybe we can help sort things out.

I had gotten into the habit of tossing the enough prime for the whole aquarium into the tank and then adding the new water after that. Now I treat the water by the bucketful and let it sit while vaccum the gravel and siphon out the old water. It seems to work pretty well.

By the way, Saturday when I discovered our fabulous water had a ammonia, I dropped about 7 ml into the 55 gal, but didn't have time to change the water. When I tested the ammonia Sunday afternoon, the ammonia was gone! I still did a 50% since I didn't trust my Nitrate kit and I figured I'd be ahead if it was still 20ppm as it was on Saturday.

S