Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I would wait till the Nitrite starts to drop a bit.

As to dealing with city water and not knowing what type of conditioner to use. Think about using a carbon filter instead. They make filters you can stick on a hose or you can simply get an extra one of those filters like you put on the drinking faucet or a britta filter if your set up is small enough.

TCL,

You'd need a pretty large filter to clear the chloramines out, not one of the little faucet ones, unless you were prepared to wait quite a while. Check out the http://www.wqa.org/pdf/TechBulletins/TB-Chloramine.pdf

Says a bed contact time of 10 minutes is required for total removal of chloramines. Probably don't need total removal but contact time needs to be way higher than you could get with a small carbon filter.

Even so, it looks like activated carbon filter of some sort is still the best way to deal with chloramines. I know that chloramine treated water can kill the yeast in bread making but if you run the water through say a britta pitcher you can reduce the chloramine enough that you can manage to bake bread. Perhaps it isn't total removal but hopefully it is enough removal for top up water.

Given the choice between chemical or activated carbon treatment - Activated carbon sounds preferable to me as well. I don't think fast treatment without the contact time is the way to go though. Chloramines are toxic to the fish and shellfish(blocks oxygen absorption by binding to iron) and not just harmful to the bacteria.

If someone is going to use filters, I think spending the extra on a good pair of activated carbon filters might be worth it. Run them in series and periodically discard the first filter in series place the old polishing filter first in line and get a new filter for the final polishing of the water. The problem is that you can't tell without monitoring, when to change the filter. Sounds like 1Kg of activated carbon could produce about 5 l/hr of water to use. All this is mentioned in the following article which is on Dialysis http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/11/2579.full. Probably most of this is relevant to discussing removal because it looks like the mechanism of action may be the same as with fish.



Wikipedia says typical treatment levels in drinking water are around 3ppm which usually translates to 3mg/l - you would have to remove a significant portion on the first pass. What works for one person might not for another because of how close they are to the treatment area and how much chloramine remains by the time the water reaches any given house could vary significantly.

Given an emergency where someone needed to replace water or loose fish, the chemical method still has appeal. Unless they already have a batch ready from an activated carbon filter, putting large quantities of untreated water in would just cause problems.

Another reason not to do a single pass with low retention time (look to the bottom under activated carbons) - http://www.buyactivatedcharcoal.com/chloramine

About Brita (and similar stuff): an evaluation done here (France) by a consumers group concluded that they are superb niches for microbes. Dunno if/how it may affect fish or plants, but...

About activated carbon: many types exist, there is no generic precise rule about how to use it, which will be trapped, when to replace it... Some bad or even only inadequately used ones may "immediately" release unwanted stuff. People producing their own use a precise recipe (which peat/wood/wotever, how to burn it in which sort of furnace/kiln...). Blood-related applications mainly use PCC, which is somewhat different to the GAC more common in water treatment.

I guess that probably throws off the amount filtered per Kg of activated carbon. It's a pity they don't say what kind of activated carbon they used in the paper I cited.

vegy boy wrote in that topic, that boiling the water for ten minutes removes the chloromines. That sounds like the simplest way. Might take all day though. Depending on how big your pot is.

Guys,

What is the deal with Ph? mine went down to 6 ppm, I don't think that is good for the fish. My nitrite still high and the nitrate is rising slowly.

When you pH drops it means the nitrogen cycle is getting into full swing. It's time to add a bit of a buffer to keep the pH from dropping too low. Careful here, cause you don't want to bounce the pH.
If you have hard tap water or bore water you might add some to provide a bit of buffer but be careful not to bring it up too far too fast.

Other things that can buffer and bring the pH back up include calcium hydroxide (hydrated lime or brickies lime) potassium hydroxide (lye) Both of those are very strong and you need to be very careful with them since you only want to move your pH about 0.2 per day.
Other things that are much slower acting (so be careful that you don't add too much and cause the pH to go too high after a longer period of time) include garden lime, potassium bicarbonate, oyster shells etc.

Generally it is best to take action on the pH before the level gets too low. If using the API test kit since it only goes down to 6, you probably should take action before it gets below 6.5 so that you can keep the pH up in a readable range. Most people aim for a pH somewhere around 6.8-7 but some people are lucky enough to be able to keep their pH stable at a lower range.

Thank you TCLynx,
I will take care of the Ph in slow increments. What about the "Ph up" (pic below)product from my pet store? is that any good or maybe harmful?

Generally aquarium products are not such a good thing in Aquaponics.
You could get the same effect with baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) but that will increase sodium levels which isn't as useful to the plants most of the time which is why we usually recommend alternating potassium and calcium products to increase pH for aquaponics since the plants need more potassium and calcium than they do sodium.