This is rediculous!

[suzimcmullen]

Twice in the last 2 months I have had sudden ammonia breaking through my RO/DI unit and stupidly used it without checking each and every batch of my water. My animals are all ok, seemingly and I've ordered a new RO/DI unit.

Now, I'm buying my water from my LFS temporarily. Saturday I made him test his water. Not to want and hurt his feelings I told him I wanted to test my test kit against his. So I tested it at the same time. It came up zero.

I used that water all weekend on my dwarf horses. It's a fairly new tank and not 100% stable. On top of that the silly horse had 2 broods of babies this week so now I went from 3 horses to over 20 in a couple weeks time. So I've been doing very small partial changes 3-5 times daily as the babies must have brine every few hours and any uneaten brine would increase the ammonia.

As of last night their tank was testing zero. I used the same water this morning as always. Then I bought more water from my LFS. A few hours later all my brine were dead and I used this new water on them too! I use instant ocean and I frequently use it after only 3 hours of brewing. It's never caused me a problem. So I tested the water from the LFS and it was 1.0 ammonia!

So I rush to check my horses because that tank is only a 5 gallon tank and any bad water on top of all the brine and excessive baby load would be bad. Sure enough, my horses are breathing fast and seem ansy and are not eating.

I quick like get some amquel in the water and put an airstone in there since amquel can cause a lowering of the oxygen. I even added a few drops of water conditioner...way too late!

I rushed out tonight and bought some distilled water and tested the dang stuff right in the parking lot! I stirred vigourously and adjusted the ph and used it for a 20% change.

My horses are coming out of it, some of them eating and only one seems distressed out of the whole herd.

The hard thing about seahorse babies are that so many of them die for no reason. So if they start to die I won't know if it's this that caused it. They have been doing so well!

Why is it so darn hard to get pure water?!!!

Does anyone here use a distillation unit?! I wonder if I should cancel my RO/DI unit and buy a distiller instead.

I feel so stupid!

Suzi

[D to the P]

Thats some bad luck. What brand RO/DI did you have that was giving you problems? Good luck with the sea horse babies. Rearing them is quite a task.

[b16drag]

Kind of weird that your LFS is having the exact same problem as you... maybe coincident, but maybe there is something else going locally?

[Drachs]

Wow, that's alot of bad luck! It's hard to imagine so much bad luck! Maybe you should tell us more about your water change procedure? Perhaps you've got a problem with your procedure?

[suzimcmullen]

Well I keep my buckets going all the time. I rinse them out and dry them between use. I fill the 5 gallon bucket as full as I can and put in enough salt and mix with a stainless steel wire wisk. I drop in the airstone and wait as long as possibly. Sometimes if I have something going on like a new animal coming or moving things around I might not wait more than a few hours. But usually, I wait overnight or at least 5-6 hours. I pretty much always go through the whole 5 gallons in a day.

I have a small bucket that fits easily into the bigger bucket for scooping out and I rinse that between uses and wipe it dry as well. A couple times per week I'll clean it with a light bleach solution and rinse with clean RO water...assuming it's really clean! I always dry it with a clean rag.

I have a bigger bucket for scooping water out of the tanks and discarding. I fill it with the new water coming in. I wash and dry it the same as the other and occasionally washing more thoroughly with bleach. I never use soap and I test my tanks at least a couple times per week. But I only test the water in the buckets or from the RO spout when there seems to be a problem.

I have 2 tanks that are in decent shape but since I have a tendency of over feeding I do at least a 1/2 gallon to a whole gallon per day. I'll often put a little more through them so that I can use the tank water I am discarding from them for hatching brine or making a small change in either my copepod or mysis tanks. Since they don't seem to be as sensitive to water and I don't feed them heavily, they don't get a lot of changes. I usually use at least half new water and half water from the other tanks in my brine tank.

My small dwarf tank gets about 2 gallons per day put through it in 4-5 small changes because it's not fully cycled and we have so many new babies in the tank I just want to keep things pure and keep the perameters from changing much throughout the day.

I can't think of anything else. I don't test ph daily but I check it often. My PH always starts out about 8.8 when I set the bucket up and it's around 8.2 within hours.

My brine shrimp tank is 2.5 gallons and it gets changed completely every day at least once or a couple smaller changes because it tends to get high ammonia in it from the process of molting.

Suzi

[suzimcmullen]

It was Culligan that was giving me problems. Now I have ordered from air water and ice. I think it's the typhoon but I forget. I hope it gets here soon because buying all this distilled is costly. But I'm not going back to that LFS for water.

Suzi

[SkyPapa]

I've been using a Typhoon for years. Nice unit.

[Aquarist007]

it may not be the ammonia at all--it could be the salinity level. What are you using to measure the salinty with?