The Truth About Dechlorinators

hey everyone and welcome to the truth behind to chlorinator now today we're gonna take all of my knowledge in the hobby for the last 15 years then I've acquired through owning a store and that kind of stuff and then apply some research I've done to back it up a little bit and that's just because I want to get this right and so know that this is from experience but we're gonna hit it with a little bit of facts as well so today we're talking about a de chlorinator I use it's complete it's my favorite one only because the way we sell we put a pump head on it and I like ease right and you'll see why that might be important later in the video when it comes to a decor inator so what is it a chlorinator do let's start there so most municipalities have chlorine or chloramine in their water right so that with that we're doing there is keeping bacteria out of the water so that humans and animals don't get sick well at the levels that we use typically that harms our aquariums beneficial bacteria can even burn some gills and and other micro fauna we might want in there right so we need to eliminate that as best we can the de chlorinator is the best way we found to do that now the chlorinator typically is made up of a few things we've got a few goals is what they're trying to do first one is break down chlorine or break down chloramine so and i'm gonna read this because i always mispronounce incorrectly sodium thiosulfate is like this imagine like a big thing of like rock salt that's what it looks like right it's a salty put it in and breaks the chemical compound down of chlorine and chloramine okay so when you're buying a chlorinator basically you're getting that dissolved into water for the most part thus far in the video okay so after that if we have chlorine and that's all we've got that's fine we've broken it down great fish are happy we're happy we move on if we have chloramine though once we break that bond with the chloramine we get we break down the chlorine part of it but we're left with some ammonia right and if we have a de chlorinator that only breaks down the chlorine part of it it actually will leave us with ammonia left in the aquarium now you as a hobbyist you've been around for a while you probably know ammonia is not good for fish alright so we need to do something with that and something like the complete or prime or AM quail or you know there's so many de chlorinators out there pick one right most of them are going to have another additive in there that is going to bind up the ammonia temporarily now what does that mean that means instead of being this horrible thing that burns your fish for a period of up to 24 hours typically I say up to it will bond a chemical with it and make it so it's not in a harmful State however we can still break it down with our filtration all right so that's a good thing that's one of the reasons why we need some filtration in our water is to help break even that ammonia down not so much even the fish we do that as well but when we do water changes okay so in that process though we have some more results or more effects one of them is the reducing agent that we have in there and that's what's reducing down the chlorine or the chloramine down is going to oxidize or use up some oxygen as well so what does that mean that means like in this aquarium here we've got oxygen Fisher okay they're doing fine I do a big water change and we put a bunch of de chlorinator in there it's going to take care of the chlorine or the chloramine but then it might also temporarily take up some of that oxygen and that's where we can get into some trouble if we have an aquarium that is already low in oxygen and a lot of people have that they don't know it one of the biggest culprits would be a planted aquarium because we focus on trying to keep co2 levels high that usually means we're not running an airstone which I personally recommend by the way or we're not running a lot of surface agitation and so while plants grow they do release oxygen which is great but at night they consume oxygen so imagine it's Saturday morning you wake up and you go oh let's do the maintenance on the planet tank and the lights aren't even on yet and you kick them on and you change 30% of that water you put the chlorinator back in you might have already been starting pretty low in oxygen so if your supply water has a bunch of oxygen in it good that's gonna help out a bit but if it was already low in oxygen like maybe you're on a well or something like that it might further even deplete it so the water you bring in might even have even less oxygen which would be bad and then we're gonna use it a chlorinator might take away even more so you can see how we can get into some distress here discus tanks can also run to this especially when you start looking at the way at which we keep fish maybe a goldfish or a discus tank we might do a 90% water change and then we bring in water that doesn't have as much oxygen and then we put chemicals in it that use up the oxygen that was there we can run into this problem right we can kill off bacteria we can kill off fish we can run all these bad things so the other thing we want to talk about is dosing right so like this most most de chlorinators out there are like one milliliter per 10 gallons of water okay now what makes that a little bit confusing is different municipalities have different amounts of chlorine in it so like our water has almost none it's almost unmeasurable which is nice I don't have to use very much whereas maybe in California in LA I know there's parts where it's like or or Vegas really like if you're going to Vegas and you taste water to rest drink it almost like honestly it's like chlorines in here like I can almost smell it and taste it right and so that would be a lot of chlorine and chloramine in there and we wouldn't need to use more to chlorinator now what is a manufacturer to do when everyone's got a different level of chlorine and most people will never test it they build a formula that will basically work for anyone and that's why you get these really ambiguous directions of you know this I love this bottle in particular because I think it captures it perfectly of the dilemma as a hobbyist and it says for best results add frits complete water before adding it to your aquarium it's been proven that it's 2 to 5 minutes to actually break down all of the chlorine chloramine so based on the chlorinator so it worse five minutes at best two minutes I myself added directly to aquarium never had a problem but that's a side tangent there if treated an aquarium for ammonia nitrite or nitrate base the dose on the aquarium volume well that makes sense like oh if I have an 800 gallon aquarium I need a dose for 800 gallons because I've got one of those things that are high either ammonia nitrate or nitrate okay I can figure that out for extremely high levels of chloramine or nitrite dosage can be repeated or increased up to five times and 24-hour period so if I was to put eighty squirts in there and treat you know I did a big water change and or I had really high nitrite and I want to bind that up for my filtration but eighty squirts there I give that up to five times so that means we can go really pwned each time we're taking up some oxygen that can be problematic gonna be aware of that so I run air stones but you've got that huge range now the problem you run into is when you are in a low oxygen situation already and then you start taking it out by changing water and then you take more out of it by putting a de chlorinator in all of those can be problematic so and sometimes there's things like aloe vera and stuff in a de chlorinator you might be using just to heal the slime coat on a fish there's other benefits to some buffer the water and most of us use it out of fear so the truth is if we're really fearful of what's going on we should test we should know what's in there and we should figure out okay well I know I'm changing 30% of water I have two parts per million chlorine going back in when I dose three pumps for 30 gallons because maybe I had a hundred gallon tank it changed 30% does that knock it out test again it does great now I know I'm doing it right or should I be dosing more is really heavy chlorine or chloramine and I gotta do those five pumps right so the truth is we need to do some testing and we're a little bit lazy and the manufacturers have catered to us which is nice but we should know that the precautions to take are don't run out of oxygen keep an eye on those fish and do things to hedge your bets if you can do anything even if you hate it an airstone or something like that just running an airstone for the next three or four hours while you're changing a water or water changing water it would do wonders not only are you doing things in the aquarium it's stressing the fish out they're gonna breathe faster you're bringing water back in you're putting in chemicals and keep in mind other chemicals do this - like fertilizers and other stuff we typically want to add to our aquarium so we can create an environment that actually worse the last thing I'll touch on is do you even need to be changing water so if you don't have high nitrates or high hormones or a reason all my water is so murky I can't see through it if you don't have a reason there's so many of us as hobbyist we just changed water once we got a habit and with that now that we know like all these things that could be going on when we change water and we've identified maybe that's not all beneficial like we you know we're opening ourselves up to some risk each time maybe we want to lessen that risk and maybe we want to do it okay I can go to every other week or once a month or something like that based on your stocking levels and the key takeaway here I think is test your water and you'll know what your nitrates are you'll know what your nitrites are you can know what your chlorine is and then a lot of people will test their water do the maintenance and walk away the best thing you could do is follow up maybe a couple hours later test your water again and go based on the work that I did what was the result because a lot of us are just going in going I did my maintenance I'm good and that's like cleaning one room in your house without opening any other doors you don't realize like oh the kids are in that room it's it's a disaster in there and because we don't check up on it we don't know and that's one of the biggest takeaways there so I would recommend using the least amount of the chlorinator that you can kind of get away with you feel comfortable with after testing and to testing a bunch that those are very key and as we are in the hobby longer and longer and longer we test less and less and less there'll be a whole nother video about testing but that's the truth behind the chlorinator is that's how it's working that's the potential risks we have and know that for the most part they're all the same they're very similar whether your only use prime oh I only use am quo I only use a car II Altima I only use Fritz complete the reality is it's like saying you only eat this burger joint they're all burger joints they're all pretty much getting the job done you might like one slightly better than the other but don't get you know if you're hungry and you're on the road guess what they're gonna fill your stomach and this is the same thing in a pinch you'll be glad you have any de chlorinator and it's cream so consider yourself lucky that you have one and you know how to use it focus on that decipher those directions hop on their website see Kim's got a very long Q&A about what theirs can do and can't do binding metals not binding metals and a lot of that might be too much for you so pick one that resonates with you and good luck now that you know the truth about de chlorinators check out the description and the pin comment below we have a link where you put in your email and we'll email you an infographic on how to make water changes SuperDuper simple and easy to manage [Music] [Music]

Channel: Aquarium Co-Op

Views: 459,105

Keywords: Aquarium Co-Op, Aquarium Co op, Aquarium Coop, how to remove chlorine from water, water conditioner, fish tanks, tap water, water conditioner for aquarium, seachem prime, seachem safe, water conditioner for betta, water conditioner for betta fish, water conditioner for fish tank, how to remove chlorine from water for betta fish

Id: pqfv15XIey4

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2020