Koi Fish Information Centre

I saw it. I get this url http://goldlenny.blogspot.com/search/label/Chloramine
I actually did such an experiment as you describe. It takes about 3 ml of Prime to get the chloramine AND ammonia out of 2 to 2.5 gallons of tap water.
The ph of water fresh from the tap is 8.8+. In a glass the ph goes down, but in a bucket it does not even overnight, unless you bubble air through it with an airstone, in which case it goes down very quickly.
7.9 is the typical ph after I bubble air through it and add 2/3 gallon of distilled water to fill a three gallon bucket.
Since the ph in my tank keeps getting lower, yesterday I used only tap water, but then I added less than half a gallon of distilled water because the tank wasn’t quite full after adding back three gallons of tap water.
ph in my tank this morning is 7.6. It barely went up. Ammonia and nitrates both went down, and nitrites are down a little. This isn’t a full 24 hours. Nitrites are between 1.0 and 2.0.
Fish were seriously stressed in their little bit of water left in the tank, but once I began to add fresh oxygenated water they did fine. (Remember that the purpose of emptying the tank was to move it around while improving the waterproofing of the floor underneath it, because the carpet had gotten wet - everytning was shut off.) Last night and this morning one of them is just a little too quiet and off his feed. None of them ate as much as yesterday, when they ate ALOT. Maybe tehy simply aren’t starving. Two of them came for the food but they didn’t catch it as well. I’d been carefully feeding them only a very small amount at a time.
I could have put some of the original tank water back, but I didn’t have the heart to put back all that smelly water with nitrite level of 2.0. Besides which I actually cleaned alot of debris off the gravel.
Should I give him antibiotic if he doesn’t perk up after I do a partial water change?
There is salt in the tank - equal to two tsps per three gallons of water. Should I increase it?
Should I add some Cycle to the filter tank, or wait and see how bad the long term effect of the drastic water change is on my cycling? It looks as if I have little working nitrobacter or nitrospira. Ammonia is under .25 (search me what 0 looks like with that API kit), nitrites are high enough, but less has been converted to nitrates than yesterday.
Yours, Dora Smith Austin, TX tiggernut24@yahoo.com

Category: Philippines Internet Koi Society