pH drop after recharging Seachem Purigan - EMERGENCY

[Floyd R Turbo]

There's flaw in your explanation. API and most others test TAN, not just free ammonia, so no matter what the ratio of Ammonia to Ammonium is is irrelevant with respect to what the test kit says. I haven't had any detectable TAN in that tank for 6 months, now all of the sudden it's 0.25ppm. It's not due to only a sharp pH swing, because the bacterial colony established in the tank would have taken care of that if it was still in tact. It has to have been affected / killed off in order for any ammonia/ammonium to even be detected. Also I have read that aerobic bacterial conversion of Ammonia into Nitrite ceases at pH below 6.0. Held at this point or lower long enough would choke off the entire colony, which is what I believe happened.

Also, I understand what you are saying abou the chemistry of pH. Guppies are susceptible to osmotic shock generated by a rapid major shift in pH, which is why I am saying they pH swing is what did them in and not the swordtails. We're talking cause or effect here, but the bottom line is that the result is a rapid drop in pH.

Rapid pH swings bringing on osmotic shock indeed do kill fish, because the fish will try to either pump too much water into its body or out of its body in an attempt to self-regulate, resulting in dehydration and death or hemorrhaging and death.

[Blueiz]

The dead fish that were in the tank could be compounding the ammonia problem. Any chance you missed some since there were fry?

Hope you get it straightened out soon..

[Floyd R Turbo]

The fry were between 4 and 6 weeks old, and guppy fry grow pretty quick. All the fry were at least 3/4" long. I did a thorough search and gravel vac, so I don't think that's the issue. Good thought though. Even if I did miss one, the bacterial colony should have been able to take care of the amount of ammonia being produced from decomp.

I wonder though if a few of my snails might have died also. There are a ton in there. Still, colony would have taken care of that, and I had a good colony, the intake on the filter had a sponge on it, and it's always really gunky when I squeeze it out (it gets clogged and gotta do that about every 2 weeks)

[Floyd R Turbo]

This is just weird. I tested this morning (it's been at least 16 hours since doing 2 back-to-back 40% PWCs) and my ammonia levels have not changed at all. Still holding steady at 0.25 ppm. I did a check test on the 55 water (which I pulled from for the big WC) and it's right at zero.

Why would the levels continue to stay elevated, but not increase significantly? Could this just be a mini-cycle?

[Kurt_Nelson]

Just out of curiosity... what type of container did you recharge the Purigen in? If it was anything but glass, the bleach could've reacted with it causing some type of chemical contamination of the Purigen. Doesn't help you now, I know, but just trying to figure out what might've happened.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Their directions say "non-metallic" so I used an old plastic container that you would get at the grocery store, say if you got some pasta salad from the counter. I've used it for all kinds of miscellaneous purposes with my aquariums and it's always well rinsed.

If you're supposed to use glass, they should say that.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Originally Posted by Etunes

That is crazy, i have never used it before and now probably never will.

In defense of this product, take a look at this search link from the Planted Aquarium forum.

The Planted Tank Forum - Search Results

I have to agree that it is one of the best products on the market, and this issue I had with recharging it is just a bad experience that probably could have been avoided had I done a little research on the subject. That doesn't exonerate Seachem from having some level of responsibility in making it better known about any potential issues that can arise from the recharging process, but I have received several non-canned responses to this issue. Here is a continuation of the e-mail conversation I've had with them:

My response to theirs (post #8)

> Please allow us to ask a few questions to help try and figure out what may have happened:
>
> how much Acid Buffer did you use?

I followed the directions for recharging to a T. I soaked in a 50/50 bleach solution for 24 hours, stirring occasionally. I rinsed and soaked in 2 cups of water and 4 Tbsp Prime for 8 hours. I rinsed and soaked in 2 cups water and 2 Tbsp Acid Buffer for 4 hours. I rinsed thoroughly and soaked in RO water for several hours and tested for residual chlorine, which came back zero.

> What instrument/test kit are you using to test the pH of your tank?

API.

> Was anything else added to the tank at within that time span?

No.

It appears from online advice I have received that my KH was too low which allowed for a rapid drop in pH.

My biggest question to you right now is what is the purpose soaking in the acid buffer solution. I thought there was some reason for it, or else it would not have been on the instructions. I would like an explanation of the purpose of this additional step for FW use. I did not expect the resin beads to release the acid buffer back into my tank water, precipitating the severe pH drop. I expected the resin would be neutralized and would work exactly the same way as if it was new out of the box. This was definitely not the case. It has taken several 10-15% water changes over a 24 hour period to get the pH reading back on the scale. I only hope that my nitrogen cycle wasn't stalled out to the point of killing off the bacterial colony in this tank.

As for your offer for trying other Seachem products, I will have to think about it before I consider using any more Seachem products.

This comes at a particularly bad time for you. I was helping out a friend with his 120g saltwater setup and was considering using some Seachem products to help lower Nitrates in his system, like Purigen, Matrix, or de*Nitrate but I'm going to have to reconsider.

Unless you can explain what happened and what to do to avoid this, and then consider posting that information on your website so that others don't encounter this again, I've lost a lot of faith in your products, which I did have a lot of faith in up until now.

By the way, I'm not the only one who has experienced this. I found several other instances on google that revealed the exact same issue. It blows me away that it is not mentioned anywhere on your website, there is nothing to allude to the requirement for additional testing or steps beyond residual chlorine testing to ensure that your product, when recharged according to the directions, doesn't cause a pH system crash. That's a serious oversight!! How many people have lost entire systems due to your lack of proper instructions?


And a second e-mail to them before they could respond


This is in addition to my last reply of this morning. I decided to test for Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate. It appears my tank is now cycling again. I have had zero ammonia in this tank since the beginning of March, even at a time when it contained over 200 fry. That's two hundred. It now reads 0.25ppm Ammonia. It looks like your inadequate directions and lack of any kind of warning have led to annihilation of my entire bacterial colony in addition to half of the fish.

Still waiting for an explanation.


And their response


We understand that you are frustrated and we are very
sorry that this has happened, but many people, including
us, regenerate Purigen on a regular basis with the use of
Acid Buffer and have had no problems. I can assure you
that we would never put instructions on the label of any
of our products that could potentially cause harm in your
aquarium, as we are all hobbyist here too and use the
products in all of our systems. Since bleach has such a
high pH, we recommend soaking it in a solution of Acid
Buffer, Neutral Regulator, or Discus Buffer in order to
bring the pH down into an acceptable range for a
freshwater environment. We really want to figure out what
could have caused this to happen and are not just putting
this aside. So with that being said, we would like to
perform the test here at Seachem exactly the way you did
and see if our results are the same. We will do the
following:

soak in a 50/50 bleach solution for 24 hours, stirring
occasionally. Rinse and soak in 2 cups of water and 4
Tbsp Prime for 8 hours. Rinse and soak in 2 cups water
and 2 Tbsp Acid Buffer for 4 hours. Rinse thoroughly and
soak in RO water for several hours

Please allow us time to do this test and we will get back
to you with our results. We want to get to the bottom of
this as much as you do and we do not want to lose you as a
customer. We appreciate your patience in this situation
and will get back to you shortly.

Thank you,

Seachem Support


And my response to them

I would think you would not need to run this experiment. I don't know what you intend to accomplish, you should know exactly how your product works, shouldn't you?

My tap water comes out at well over 8.8, off the scale on the high pH test kit, but in my tanks, after about a week, it settles down to around 7.6-7.8. Before recharging, that's where it was, about 7.6. I use softened water, so it has very low KH (maybe 3 at the highest) and GH around 2. It is a 10 gallon tank. I hope that's enough information for you to replicate the scenario. The filter I use is a Whisper EX20, and I take out the carbon/filter cartridge because of the plants and just drop the 100ml bag of Purigen in there. It took less than 12 hours to drop the pH off the bottom end of the scale, I'm guessing it took about 15 minutes actually 'cause those fish were dead as a doornail

END OF EMAILS

So we will see how this one pans out.

All that being said, I still think the product works fantastically, I've never had systems stay as stable and clear with little effort. I just can't comprehend that they wouldn't explain the recharging process a little more accurately on the label or on the website so it could be tailored to each individual's needs.

[Etunes]

Maybe i will consider trying it. But i am defiinatly gonna wait to see how it pans out.

[Kurt_Nelson]

Originally Posted by Floyd R Turbo

Their directions say "non-metallic" so I used an old plastic container that you would get at the grocery store, say if you got some pasta salad from the counter. I've used it for all kinds of miscellaneous purposes with my aquariums and it's always well rinsed.

If you're supposed to use glass, they should say that.

My only thinking about the plastic is that the plastic could've absorbed something previously, and the bleach brought it back out into solution when you were regenerating. If you'd never bleached that container before, just rinsing it with water maybe didn't get whatever it was out on previous occassions. I'm just thinking out loud here... trying to figure out where things could've gone haywire on you.

[Blueiz]

Regarding the ammonia levels. You are probably experiencing a mini cycle. I'm sure there was bacteria colonized on the purigen that was destroyed when you recharged it, and of course your bio filter may have been damaged by whatever happened with your PH. If you are using chlorinated water for your water changes, it is transformed to non toxic to fish ammonia to be removed by the bio filter by your dechlor, so this is adding to your total ammonia levels as well. If your bio filter had totally crashed, it would make sense that your ammonia levels would be rising with each water change and would be off the charts by now. That's just my hypothesis..

[Floyd R Turbo]

I am not following part of your comment. You are saying that Chlorinated water, when treated with dechlor (prime), it turns into ammonia? I had never heard that before.

I was using dechlorinated tap water at first, then I started doing PWCs using established water from my 55g and my ammonia levels stay at 0.25ppm. I let it sit all day yesterday without doing anything, and tested about 3x throughout the day and this AM they are still at 0.25ppm.

I could see, if the dechlor works as described, that would explain why I am getting ammonia in the tank, however if I had an active bio-filter, it would all be gone as soon as the tank water turned over a few times.

What it doesn't explain is why I get no change in ammonia levels after 40/40 PWC (which mathematically works out to a 64% water change) using established tank water.

This is just really weird to me. I can't figure out what's going on.

Nitrites still zero
Nitrites have not moved from 10 in 3 days
That could be due to the 50-70 Vallisneria Nanas I have in there, but it was 40 before all this (and before all the water changes)

[Floyd R Turbo]

I have decided to perform a little experiment of my own. I've just set it up and I will continue to posts results. Here's the setup:

After performing a 30% PWC on my 55 and 50% on the 10 (using 55 water), I filled a 5g bucket with about 4.5g of tap water at 77F, put in a power head, a heater to maintain the temp (hopefully, it's a big heater, but it's all I had), and tested the parameters. Here are the starting figures:

Temp 77F (+/- 2F)
KH 4
GH 1, maybe 2
pH 9.0 - estimate, off scale
Ammonia 0.1
Nitrite 0
Nitrate 5

At 2pm CST I gave the 100mL bag of Purigen that started the whole thing one last rinse in tap water and dropped it in the bucket.

The flow form the power head makes it looks like there are little volcanic eruptions in the stuff, and they move around as the bag moves slightly, it's pretty mesmerizing. So 10 minutes later I realized I was still watching it and slapped my own face and sat down and wrote this; this step was not part of the experiment. I will not be staring for 10 minutes and then slapping my face every time I test the water again. Just so you know.

I am very interested in what will happen, since I have been letting this bag sit in about 2-3 cups of water on the kitchen counter for several days and the pH will test about 6.4, but if I stir it and test it goes off the bottom of the scale.

In the meantime, it's time to finally round up the fry and get them out of there, now that the water it somewhat stabilized and matched, all I have to do is catch them and then drip acclimate them. pH swings pretty good from 7.4 in the 55 after a 30% change with tap water > 9.0.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Experiment update!

I tested the pH at 2:35-2:40 CST and it had already dropped to 8.2 in 40 minutes.

I tested again at 3:15 and it had dropped to around 7.4.

The only other thing I forgot to do with this experiment is have a control. I will have to repeat the experiment without the Purigen in the bucket to make sure that this pH drop is not just inherent to the tap water chemistry. I have let a bucket of tap water sit for 48 hours with no pH change, but I wasn't running a heater and a power head in it, and that may make a difference. It still settles out in my aquariums at around 7.6 in 24-48 hours and pretty much stays there. But it's always a good idea to run a proper experiment IMO. If I had 2 heaters I could do it right.

[Blueiz]

Originally Posted by Floyd R Turbo

There's flaw in your explanation. API and most others test TAN, not just free ammonia, so no matter what the ratio of Ammonia to Ammonium is is irrelevant with respect to what the test kit says. I haven't had any detectable TAN in that tank for 6 months, now all of the sudden it's 0.25ppm. It's not due to only a sharp pH swing, because the bacterial colony established in the tank would have taken care of that if it was still in tact. It has to have been affected / killed off in order for any ammonia/ammonium to even be detected. Also I have read that aerobic bacterial conversion of Ammonia into Nitrite ceases at pH below 6.0. Held at this point or lower long enough would choke off the entire colony, which is what I believe happened.

Also, I understand what you are saying abou the chemistry of pH. Guppies are susceptible to osmotic shock generated by a rapid major shift in pH, which is why I am saying they pH swing is what did them in and not the swordtails. We're talking cause or effect here, but the bottom line is that the result is a rapid drop in pH.

Rapid pH swings bringing on osmotic shock indeed do kill fish, because the fish will try to either pump too much water into its body or out of its body in an attempt to self-regulate, resulting in dehydration and death or hemorrhaging and death.

This is from the seachem prime website

Prime® also contains a binder which renders ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate non-toxic. It is very important to understand how those two functions work together. All dechlorinators operate through a chemical process known as reduction. In this process, toxic dissolved chlorine gas (Cl2) is converted into non-toxic chloride ions (Cl-). The reduction process also breaks the bonds between chlorine and nitrogen atoms in the chloramine molecule (NH2Cl), freeing the chlorine atoms and replacing them with hydrogen (H) to create ammonia (NH3).

As far as the liquid tests for ammonia, I'm not exactly following your expalanation regarding it. I will say that the the liquid test kits for ammonia test for total ammonia, the Ionized form is what is harmful to fish, the prime detoxifies this into the un ionized form.

I'm unsure of what you mean by TAN. I personally use the ammo alert to test for the free ammonia that is harmful to fish. So, if you aren't testing for total ammonia then my theory is no good.

[Floyd R Turbo]

TAN is Total Ammonia Nitrogen, and includes free ammonia and ammonium. Check out this, I think we're basically on the same page

Aquaworld Aquarium - The Ammonia and pH Relationship

But almost every single test kit out there tests for combined total NH3 + NH4+, in fact API lists it on the bottle.

The nitrifying bacteria that consume ammonia consume both NH3 and NH4+ so the fact that it's present in my system after either doing partial PWCs with tap water & prime or doing large WCs with established tank water free of either NH3 or NH4+ and also not recently treated with Prime can only lead to the conclusion that the nitrifying bacteria are not present in enough quantity to immediately reduce ammonia in the system.

As far as the test kit being no good, once your tank is cycled you don't need to test for ammonia anyways so it's only useful in the cycling phase and then to spot test to check for problems, and you just have to know what it means, so I guess it's useless if you don't know what it means. Know what I mean?

Update on the experiment, 415pm 7.2, 8pm 7.2 so that part is done. Time to empty the bucket and do the control part.

Got all the fish out of the 10g into the 55. I had about 40 8 week old Swordtail fry that seem to have survived the transfer, but my Serpae tetras when bonkers when I dumped them in and I believe they got the 10 4 week old smaller fry pretty much right away. Oh well this helps solve my overpopulation problem. Sword mama is pregnant always anyways.

[Kurt_Nelson]

Originally Posted by Floyd R Turbo

...I will have to repeat the experiment without the Purigen in the bucket to make sure that this pH drop is not just inherent to the tap water chemistry....

I think in your control test, you'll find that the pH drop is not due to the Purigen. If the pH of the tap is >9.0, it will definitely drop in pH as it is aerated. The pH will decrease as the water absorbs CO2.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Normally, I would agree with you. However, this appears to not be the case, at least so far. I refilled @ 545 CST with 76-78F fresh tap water, added the heater and power head and tested, pH 9+, same as before.

I just tested at 625 and pH is exactly the same deep purple. No shift down on to the scale yet.

I thought adding the power head instead of letting it sit stagnant might make a difference compared to the bucket I let sit for 48 hours, but time will tell.

Interestingly, my final test before dumping the original bucket revealed a slight increase in pH. It bottomed out at 7.2 and when I tested this evening, 24 hours after 7.2, it was 7.4. I tested twice to make sure.

[Floyd R Turbo]

Ok, so 1015am and it's at 8.2, so at least it has started to drop. Still nothing like what the purigen did though.

So yesterday, I pulled all the plants and snails out of the 10, did a decent gravel vac and got a bucket of super nasty water (plant food down the drain) and took all but enough water to cover the gravel out and filled with the 4.5g test water and another 4.5g tap water, replanted, took the sponge intake off the HOB and put a carbon filter in the inside, and put the air pump back on the sponge filter, in hopes of clearing the water and getting both the bio-cartridge in the HOB and the sponge back up to full biological capacity, if there was anything left on them to begin with.

Ammonia tested 0.25ppm about an hour after the PWC, but this AM it tested clear as a bell yellow zero ammonia, and clear blue Nitrites zero.

So I think it's safe to net the remaining fry and put them back in. I had an over-abundance anyways. But still POd that all but 2 of the mickey mouse swords are gone, they were just like little orange targets.

[Floyd R Turbo]

4pm and it's at 8.0. So it took the Purigen just over 35 minutes to do what the water did on it's own in over 22 hours.

I dropped the Purigen in after the test just out of curiosity. The stagnant water it was in had a pH around 7, but it hadn't been agitated so we'll see what it does in the next couple hours.

Then I'm going to run it again in a fresh bucket of tap water and see if it's lost it's acid 'charge'.

[Phrozian]

Hi Floyd,

I'm a new fish-keeper, but I find your 0.25 ammonia level strikingly similar to what I had recently.
I live in Australia, and because of fin-rot, I had to treat my tank with tri-sulfa tablets (Only antibiotic available...). After that, my (very weak) bacterial colonies just carked it and I suffered ammonia spikes. What I ended up doing, was to top off the tank with those bottles of bacteria from shops every day when I do PWCs, and I noticed my ammonia levels stayed at 0.25 for a month, no matter what I did.

My guess is that your bacterial colony was damaged, but not eradicated. I've read (and remembered from uni) that bacterial colonies typically goes through 5 stages of metabolic process before they essentially 'replicate'. It is during this replication stage, that they actually produce waste as well, rather than simply consuming it. So until your bacterial colony actually reaches a critical mass where the post-replicated bacteria is maturing and consuming ammonia faster than it produces, your tank's capacity to cycle will be severely compromised (as you have observed already).

I'm not sure if this helps explain your mysterious ammonia levels, but I did a few test on my own tank, as well as with laboratory equipments and chemicals, the data I got fits this hypothesis.