Ammonia off the chart!

It sounds like you desparately need a much better RO unit! 12gpd is .5g per
hour and for your system, you need much much more production. The 100gpd units
are available online - even I sell them for a very reasonable price. With
optimum conditions, you should be able to create 200g of water in two days,
assuming your TDS isn't super high, your source water isn't super cold, and your
PSI is 40 or higher.

For now, you might consider buying a whole bunch of RO water from the LFS or
distilled water from your super market to change out 50% of the water. Your
Ammonia level is really too high for any life to survive, imho.Scrub the rock in
the water you have now, and put it back into the tank once you've changed a ton
of that water.

You're going to have to make a lot of water quickly, but you don't have to wait
a week. As soon as the salinity and temperature match, change it out. You are
only dealing with LR at this point, and it is cycling anyway so it isn't a
critical stage.

You can definitely use something like Amquel+ or Seachem's Prime to lock up the
Ammonia, but it will still be in the water. This tends to screw up test
results, so you'll have to find a test kit that works with that product to give
you the real readings.

Run a skimmer on that system and clean it well daily to get peak efficiency.
Ammonia of 4ppm is as high as I'd want it to go, but others will hopefully chime
in.

Marc


Justin Boucher wrote:

Hello all,
I'm in the process of curing LR for my FOWLR and recently performed an
ammonia test. The test (new) only goes to 8 ppm and in less than 3 minutes,
the test sample showed at least 8 ppm. Due to the size of the tank and the
rate of my RO, a quick 50% water change is somewhere along the lines of 10
days when you consider saltinity conditioning and temp adjustment. I
currently have a 100 gal reservoir for salt water prep in the garage and
have been conditioning water for a good LR scrub down (there's still a lot
of dead growth on them) and will be ready in the next two days.

My system is set up for small simple water draining and was I considering a
daily purge of system water and let the attached RO refill the tank. This
is about 12 gals a day but I know the salinity will slowly declline (~280
gal in circulation for a 240 gal display tank). I was considering preparing
concentrated salt water to periodically add to the system water while I
perform the daily water changes. I figure that the salinity range would be
no more than .002 as I make these adjustments.

Any thoughts on this proceedure? I'm concerned about loosing too much live
organisms on the LR due to the high ammonia and given the time frame it
would take to reduce the level at 12 gal a day, that can take a long time.
Once I have the system stabilized and stocked, I thgouth this would be a
great way to do more frequent maintenance water changes.

Thank you,
Justin

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