This guy preaching not using tank water to clean media

[duanes]

I hose off media such as porrett foam straight from the garden hose.
While working as a microbiologist with a drinking water facility lab, we did tests to determine bacterial colonies in our Chloraminated distribution system.
We found ammonia consuming species all living happily throughout that distribution system,
Below our average Chloramine residual from the tap

I too, find most Youtubers anecdotal pronouncements are short on real data, and are in need of much scientific fact checking

 

[jjohnwm]

This is funny and ironic to me, since the chlorine/chloramine concentration in treated drinking water is specifically formulated to kill bacteria and other microorganisms.

Yes, but...is it intended to still be present in sufficient concentrations when the water comes out of the tap to still be toxic to those bugs and germs? Or is it merely intended to disinfect the water when it is leaving the treatment facility?

The chlorine is a toxic substance added to the water to kill bacteria, but the concentration can't be allowed to rise so high that it's dangerous to us. Isn't that the rationale behind the use of chloramine vs. chlorine? i.e. that chloramine is more stable and takes longer to dissipate, allowing the use of lower concentrations while still maintaining a high enough residual amount for a longer time to still kill the bad bugs?

I well remember growing up and being amazed how much our city tap water smelled like a public swimming pool; is it my imagination, or is that kind of experience less prevalent today? Have I simply become "nose-blind" to chlorine? I just don't think that the water-treatment facilities put so much into the water that the domestic faucets at the far end of the piping system are still spewing water that is sterile and germ-free. Am I incorrect in this thinking?

This question has duanes written all over it.

Edited to add: Thank you, duanes ! You answered my question while I was still typing it!

 

[FINWIN]

I will occasionally rinse bio media under tap, but only with cool water and ONLY to get sludge/mulm off. Maybe once every 2 months or so if the ceramic media bags get too gunky. The Bio Bale is plastic ribbon so I don't touch that other than dipping it in a bucket of tank water. I use tank water from my python drain so there's no glop in it at all. It just looks like pee water.

Prefilters and mechanical sponges I rinse in regular water. So long story short the 'main' biomedia is untouched and all the mechanical stuff rinsed in tap water. All y'all with well water don't have to do any drama.

I find ceramic rings do build up lots of mud in the bags and tank water doesn't seem to clear sludge out like tap water does. Don't know why.

 

[skjl47]

Jeff, just for the record, how you or anyone else cleans their bio media is entirely up to them. I wasn't the only person that came to the same conclusion early on in this thread.

This is funny and ironic to me, since the chlorine/chloramine concentration in treated drinking water is specifically formulated to kill bacteria and other microorganisms.

Hello; Again the choice is not black or white. It is not never thoroughly clean filter media and so put fish feces and other such back into the tank. There are ways to have clean filter parts and keep a population of BB. A simple way is to have a filter system with more than one chamber as i do on one tank. I do one chamber at a time.
On smaller tanks with only one filter chamber I do as the guy in the video does. I rinse some parts and leave others alone. Note he did not clean the main housing of the filter nor the tubes which feed into and out of it. Did he lose some BB colonies by cleaning with tap water? Sure. Do those who squeeze that same sort of filter material by hand in old tank water lose some BB? Sure. One way likely kills off more BB that the other. A difference is the material is cleaner when put back into the filter.
Another factor is the guy only does such a cleaning every so often. Six months or so I think. He is not wiping out the BB every few days. Even then he is not removing all BB in the tank and filter system. To me if the worry is the BB population, then culture some extra to have on hand after a more thorough filter cleaning.

Now that I think about it if my worry was the tap water, I can come up with a way to do a thorough cleaning and not use tap water. I have a submersible pump lying about. I could treat a bucket of tap water with PRIME or some such and use the pump to rinse the filter material.

But as written above. How we run our tanks is up to each of us.

 

[skjl47]

but...is it intended to still be present in sufficient concentrations when the water comes out of the tap to still be toxic to those bugs and germs? Or is it merely intended to disinfect the water when it is leaving the treatment facility?

Hello; Contact time is a question worth considering.

 

[jason longboard]

All I know, is in my town here in Bakersfield CA, couple hours north of los angeles, my stepdad retired from the water district and our water is treated big time and many of us have had very bad experiences using tap to clean, so you better have other filters running if you do.

 

[RD.]

A partial re-post from a similar discussion that took place in the past here on MFK….



I think that this hobby can be a simple, or as complicated, as one wants to make it. I recall looking after a friends fish room while he was away in Singapore on a fish buying trip. He handed me 2 fricken pages of instructions & things that I needed to check each day! LOL But he had some incredible fish, probably 20K worth of Asian aro alone, along with thousands of dollars’ worth of black rays, and various other not so easy to find fish. His fish room was crazy over engineered, and super impressive by design, and he was smart enough to pull it all off & make it run like a Swiss watch. Myself, I could never build a fish room like that, I just don't have the know how or smarts in that area. I understand my limitations. Asking me to design and build a fish room like his would be like asking me to design & build a 3 story home.



I’m a simple guy which is why I tend to apply the KISS (keep it simple stupid) method to fish keeping as much as possible. I also like to add a layer of redundancy where I can, more than 1 filter (in case filter fails), more than 1 heater (at lower wattage so as not to cook fish if/when a thermostat sticks ON) , everything plugged into a GFCI power bar or receptacle, or dedicated GFCI breaker - with a grounding probe in each tank. NOT that I would EVER suggest to others to do this with their bio-media, and their tanks, but ....... I clean my sponges, and finer filter media directly under the tap with 2 ppm chloramine. I understand that I am killing off a percentage of bio-bacteria while doing this, but I honestly don't care if the bacteria is almost completely wiped clean each time that I do this, because I have a large bag of very well established (20+ yrs established) sintered glass bio-media in each filter that I protect like the crown jewels. Each tank contains 3 large bags of well-seasoned bio-media.

Those bio-media bags get a light swish in a bucket filled with clean, dechlorinated with Seachem Safe, tap water. I also clean ALL filters at the same time, on the same day, in each tank. Again, this is what I do, with my filters, and my tanks, and my species of fish, because I know exactly what I am doing. I would never recommend this to others. Way too many variables involved to second guess someone else's set up from afar.

One of my large bio-media bags is enough to kick start a 100 gallon tank, instantly. Just add water & fish. I would NEVER clean that media anywhere near ANYTHING that could even remotely be considered toxic. I too have learned my fair share of lessons, the hard way.


Now if I had a 0.1 ppm chlorine residual coming out of my tap, I wouldn't be the least bit worried about dechlorinator, and would probably do exactly like Ted Judy, or at the very most use a weak sodium thiosulfate solution for water changes, and for cleaning media. I don't have plants to help remove free ammonia (NH3) which is also very toxic to fish, so I use a water conditioner that can render NH3 safe for fish (Seachem Safe), because with each water change with chloramine, once the chlorine/ammonia bond is split, free ammonia is left behind. Free ammonia is like second hand smoke, even a little causes harm, and can have a cumulative effect. I think that this hobby can be a simple, or as complicated, as one wants to make it.

If someone feels that the chlorine and/or chloramine coming out of their taps won't cause any issues in their set ups, or their bio-media, then by all means go for it.
I also do massive water changes in the 80-90% range, and I have high pH, and at the higher pH values free ammonia becomes a lot more toxic to fish. Add higher temps to that equation and things become even more deadly, if one isn't careful. I hesitate to even mention how large of water changes I do, so as not to influence someone that keeps more sensitive species, or doesn't understand their own personal limitations, like I do. I have kept species of fish in the past where 30% water changes were pretty much the breaking point for their stress level, so that's as high as I went.


This is why is it so important to for each & every hobbyist to understand their limitations, with their set ups, and their fish, and then live by those limitations.

Yes, but...is it intended to still be present in sufficient concentrations when the water comes out of the tap to still be toxic to those bugs and germs? Or is it merely intended to disinfect the water when it is leaving the treatment facility?

The chlorine is a toxic substance added to the water to kill bacteria, but the concentration can't be allowed to rise so high that it's dangerous to us. Isn't that the rationale behind the use of chloramine vs. chlorine? i.e. that chloramine is more stable and takes longer to dissipate, allowing the use of lower concentrations while still maintaining a high enough residual amount for a longer time to still kill the bad bugs?

I well remember growing up and being amazed how much our city tap water smelled like a public swimming pool; is it my imagination, or is that kind of experience less prevalent today? Have I simply become "nose-blind" to chlorine? I just don't think that the water-treatment facilities put so much into the water that the domestic faucets at the far end of the piping system are still spewing water that is sterile and germ-free. Am I incorrect in this thinking?

This question has duanes written all over it.

Edited to add: Thank you, duanes ! You answered my question while I was still typing it!

The true measure of success, or not, would always start out with the disinfectant residual at the users end. In other words, the answer is far more complicated than what Duane posted. As an example, some cities in the US list 4 ppm chloramine as the high end range for their district, and if one lived near by, as in the first few miles, the residual could potentially be as high as 4 ppm. Still think that would be ok to blast with a garden hose? And nitrifying bacteria found in a supply water system, will not necessarily be the same as what’s found in an aquarium. squint and I already had that discussion in the past as well. Lol

 

[Backfromthedead]

Yes, but...is it intended to still be present in sufficient concentrations when the water comes out of the tap to still be toxic to those bugs and germs? Or is it merely intended to disinfect the water when it is leaving the treatment facility?

The chlorine is a toxic substance added to the water to kill bacteria, but the concentration can't be allowed to rise so high that it's dangerous to us. Isn't that the rationale behind the use of chloramine vs. chlorine? i.e. that chloramine is more stable and takes longer to dissipate, allowing the use of lower concentrations while still maintaining a high enough residual amount for a longer time to still kill the bad bugs?

I well remember growing up and being amazed how much our city tap water smelled like a public swimming pool; is it my imagination, or is that kind of experience less prevalent today? Have I simply become "nose-blind" to chlorine? I just don't think that the water-treatment facilities put so much into the water that the domestic faucets at the far end of the piping system are still spewing water that is sterile and germ-free. Am I incorrect in this thinking?

This question has duanes written all over it.

Edited to add: Thank you, duanes ! You answered my question while I was still typing it!

I suppose duanes would know...but my logic kicks in here. How exactly would you treat a certain volume of untreated water at a certain concentration to disinfect it, then what? Mix that concentration into a larger volume of untreated water, thus diluting it so it would not effectively disinfect it? Or is it all treated at a certain concentration then removed somehow before leaving or simply dissipates as it moves into the water mains? Perfectly honest here, i should know more about this and i'm admittedly confused about this "residual" chlorine factor.

duanes i seem to recall you saying the chlorine was pumped directly into the water supply at the intake? How does this work in dummy verbage?

 

[esoxlucius]

squint and I already had that discussion in the past as well. Lol

I miss squint, he was quite the character, lol.

 

[RD.]

I miss squint, he was quite the character, lol.

He was barely out of high school. Lol. More on water distribution nitrifying bacteria….. etc. etc.

How to lower ammonia?

I tested my water and the ammonia continues to be high. Nitrites are 0 and nitrates are 20ppm but ammonia stays high even after frequent water changes. Is my faucet water have high ammonia should I use more de-chlorinator?

www.monsterfishkeepers.com

My advice, same as always, proceed with caution.