Removing chlorine

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

Mark Hewitt

Aquarium Advice FINatic
Joined
Jan 4, 2010
Messages
786
Location
Chester-le-Street, UK
This advice from Northumbria Water, who supply the water to my house and others in the North of England

Some people do not like the taste or smell of chlorine in their tap water but there is an easy and effective way to get round this. At night before you go to bed simply fill a jug with tap water and put it in your fridge. During the night the chlorine will bubble off and the water will become chilled. In the morning you will find that the water tastes as good, if not better, than any water you can buy in a bottle.

Now, I'm not sure with this advice if putting it in the fridge is necessary. But it does seem that the advice to leave the water to stand overnight has some merit.
 
Yes, chlorine will evaporate over a 12-24 hour period. The trouble that you run into when using this method for tanks is most municipalties use chloramine as well and this does not evaporate :)
 
People have used this method of dechlorinating for a long time (before Prime and other dechlor's were around). Most put an air stone in the water to increase surface agitation which speeds up the chlorine evaporation.

As mentioned though many places are switching over to chloramine which does not evaporate as readily from the water. In this case a dechlorinator is necessary.

It is easy to test your water for chloramine if you have a good liquid reagent test kit. If you test tap water for ammonia and get a positive reading, you have chloramine in your water (or a contaminated well!).

The main reason why this method is rarely used anymore in tropical tanks is because you'd need to heat the water again prior to addition to the tank to avoid shocking the fish from a temp swing.

Just buy a bottle of Prime. It lasts near forever, only costs a couple bucks, and has the added benefit of removing trace amounts of heavy metals and detoxifying ammonia/nitrIte/nitrAte.
 
seachem_prime.jpg
 
Back
Top Bottom