Help! Ammonia in the tap water!

**scruffy** · 12-08-2007, 06:54 PM

Last night I decided to test my tap water with my API test kits, just to see if the kits were working. My nitrates seemed to be high no matter what I did water change wise and I'd had that kit for a few months and I was wondering if it was past due. I had replaced my ammonia kit a few weeks ago and nitrite kit about 2 months ago, but I thought I'd check them out, too. Well, the nitrate kit came up about 20 ppm on the tap water, the nitrite was fine, the PH was high enough to run a small car (that's normal for us), but the ammonia was came up .5 ppm! This is directly out of the kitchen faucet.

Since I usually clean my tanks on Saturday, and I wasn't sure what to make of my test kits, I took some samples from all three of my tanks and the tap to a petsmart and had them test the water. Yes they use test strips, but they're free and are used to being nice to people with funky water.

With the test strips, my 55 gal goldfish tank had 20 ppm nitrate, and my 42 gal hex had a low dose of nitrite not sure of the ppm, the 20 gal had OK nitrite and nitrate, and all of them had .5 ammonia. When she got to the tap water, the tap water had .5 ppm ammonia, just like my test kit.

So what am to do? I'd like to fix that little nitrite spike in the hex, but I'd sure hate to add more fat to the fire with my tap water. I changed the 55 last time on Wednesday, and the 42 and the 20 on Thursday.

I live just North of St. Louis MO and I have felt blessed to be in an area that not only has the best tasting water, but plentiful water. It's just not great for any aqarium stuff but fishless cycling. Is there a gadget I can put on one of our faucets to stop this? Would a little Prime or amquel help?

Help me
s

**SkarloeysMom** · 12-09-2007, 02:05 AM

We have the same problem with ammonia in the tap water here. The simple fix is just to use Amquel as your water conditioner. Once you start using it your water changes will no longer be adding ammonia to the tank so you're other reading should be fine too.

**MeganL3985** · 12-09-2007, 02:08 AM

S.M.'s got it....just toss some amquel in there.

**OscarFan** · 12-09-2007, 02:11 AM

Another product is Ammo Carbs they remove Ammonia

**scruffy** · 12-09-2007, 02:51 AM

Well I had some prime and I put a little more than 5ml in each of my tanks. I still had a lot of fish in my 20 gal spending too much time at the surface and a few in the 42 looked peaked so I did a 50% water change. This time, I added the prime to the new water and let it sit for a bit before adding it to the tank. I had been just putting the full tank dose of prime in the tanks, and putting the tap water on top. I didn't know city water could have ammonia. No wonder I had been cycling so long!