City water ammonia is up again

[KLKelly]

I got some water from my moms (east end near the costco) today for water changes.  Over the summer it was showing .50 of ammonia - prime easily takes care of this.

Today I did a 100% water change on my 3 gallon betta tank (double dosed with prime just in case) and the alert card showed alert right away.  I added a few more drops of prime and its still showing alert.

Ammonia in the untreated water is a bit above 1.0.  In the betta tank its .50.

Just a heads up.  I would have thought with the cooler weather that the ammonia level would go down not up!

[Nerine]

you can actually smell the difference in the water....chlorine seems high as well right now

hope the betta is doing ok!

[fishycanuck]

Why are you doing 100 percent water changes?

[KLKelly]

Because I can't cycle a 3 gallon tank.  Even 50% water changes would never reduce ammonia to zero - it would be ever present but in small quantities. I do water changes when ammonia starts registering with my test kit.  Up until today it wasn't a major concern because prime took care of the ammonia in the tap water.

My goldfish fry are moving into the main tank this week and he will be getting a fully cycled ten gallon tank all to himself.

I was thinking of setting this up as a naturally planted tank.

[dan2x38]

The City uses chloramine. Prime breaks down the chloramine into ammonia & chlorine. The ammonia is detoxed by the Prime it can then be broke down by the bio-filter. Certain test kits still detect that detoxed ammonia therefore giving positive readings of NH3. When Prime or similar water conditioners are not used then this has been suspected to be the reason for sudden fish death. If a product breaks down the chloramine but does not detox the NH3 then it can by theory poison the fish..... If your using Prime and your Betta is showing no stress signs I would not be concerned...

[Fishnut]

I did a 100% water change in my Koi/goldfish tank last weekend too because I had to move the tank.  All the fish started gasping, so I dumped in twice the amount of conditioner, extra salt and added a powerhead with one of those air infuser hoses.  They survived and looked fine the next day, except for the larger koi.  He took a few days to start breathing normally again.  What a panic!

Lately I've been using an entire cap full of Aqua Plus per bucket of water.  I have used this stuff for quite a number of years.  I tried using Prime because it is more concentrated than Aqua Plus, but when I used it, almost all the fish I had died.  The bottle said to be careful with not overdosing a tank because of something to do with it using sulpher, but perhaps in my cautious dosing, I under dosed the tanks and the fish died form too much choramine.