Water Changes: Bucket and Hose Question

patadams66

so i read a lot that people run hoses from sinks ETC ETC ETC to do their water changes.

I ASSUME (and we know what that does) that not all of these people have well water?

if i have city water that i have to treat are buckets my only option?

i have a bad back and lifting 50 lb buckets of water up to my shoulders 5-6 times is probably not in my best interest, but its the way i have been doing it.

i didnt think it was safe to put the water directly from the sink into the tank and treat it in the tank for chlorine but maybe im wrong?

Thanks in Advance Fellow Fish Lovers

Mikaila31

well I have a well so no chlorine, but I know lots of people that do the same with city water. Just add dechlor to the tank before you fill it up. Add enough for the full volume of the tank then just run straight tap to it. Dechlor works almost instantly. If you really care you can look around for some chlorine test strips to test your tap. Its fine if these are the cheap test strip or even the little paper strips as they are pretty low reading. Ones for pools would be best... prime gives you dosage based on ppm of chlorine... But either way it should be fine if you just dechlorinate the tank then add temp matched tap water straight too it. A lot of things are on your side TBH. The dechlorinator, diffusion of the chlorine from the tap(if you have say 1ppm in tap(which is pretty high) and do a 25% water, even without dechlor your tank only has a 0.25ppm concentration of chlorine), chlorine will gas off pretty quickly(chloramines won't though)... Then there is the stress concentration... small amounts of chlorine won't really harm anything but sensitive fish. Same for your filter bacteria. I know some people who run large fish rooms just do smaller water changes and if they have only chlorine in the tap they don't even bother with dechlor because of the diffusion then gas off.

patadams66

a huge bomb of joy just went off in my back.

i guess i just thought tap water= dead fishy and that was it! but thats great news.

redchigh

but take care to get the temperatures as close as possible...

And it couldn't hurt to take a break halfway through and split the dechlor into two doses...

OscarLoverJim

Yeah dechlorinators work pretty much instantaneously. Just make sure you have one that breaks the chlorine bond in case your local water principality uses chloramine rather than just chlorine. I always advocate using Prime.