I say this with the full knowledge that I will be attacked by several die hard people on the board. However, I say this with the knowledge of my chemistry degree, and half a decade of work in biomedical research. chlorine is highly over rated. Chlorine is a gass (Chemically represented as Cl2). Therefore, there are many ways of quickly removing it. I have friends who have raised 10-15 generations of discuss, doing approximately 25% water changes daily (no filter aquariums) without ever letting the water sit, or using a dechlorinator, and we all know how needy discus are (this particular person has a PhD in chemistry, and worked as a head researcher for Pharmacia). Second person I know has been raising angelfish (about 15 different variants) doing the same technique. No mortalities in both. I used fresh water for when I was breeding seahorses (no need to worry about
TDS concentrations rising with high water change rates). The way all three of us accomplished this is that we simply used an airation method as we were pouring. In other words, we held our finger over the hose and let the water jet into the aquarium, driving the chlorine out, or we simply used a sink (most sinks in the US, with the exception of laundry sinks have a built in airation piece, that mixes the water with air to drive out chlorine, making your sink water look white, as opposed to the clear you get out of a hose.) However, if you want to apply this technique, I would advise to call your local water board, and find out if they use chloraime. This technique SHOULD work for cloramine, but I have never tested it, and would strongly suggest that you should not test it on your prized fish, or reef tank (if you don't use
RO/
DI which for that you really should). It would be worth it to study this issue further without following what industry tells us. After all, dechlorinators are a multi-million dollar industry, and I know I speak for myself when I say that I can use every dime to further my aquarium addictions.
Andrej Spec
ps. I say this to encourage debate, not to insult anybody, or make them feel like they are in the wrong. If anybody has any concrete evidence (not anecdotal) about this, I would be more than interested to read about it.