Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
Safe unionised ammonia level?
Temp is stable at 25 and usually stays within .5 above or below. PH also stays pretty steady at about 7.6 although I just did a 20% change so I am waiting for things to settle again.
Am I correct in thinking that there will be a small ammont of ammonia as it is being excreted by the fish and that the biological filtration will keep it at a safe level or should there be no measurable ammonia with filtration immediately removing ammonia?
After some time on google most of the info is regarding calculating unionised from the total ammonia reading but I already have a very good excel spread sheet for that
(thx)This page was interesting, but I don't have enough knowledge to know how valid it all is.
www.thekrib.com/Chemistry/ammonia-toxicity.html
Maybe I am over thinking this a bit but I really don't want to be very slowly poisoning my fish.
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If at pH 7.6 and temp 25 C you get an unionised ammonia reading of 0.006 mg/l then at pH 7.8 it will be 0.009 (danger), at pH 8 it will be ~0.015 (big danger and potential losses quickly), and at pH 8.5 it will be over double the tough-nut upper level (~0.04 mg/l) if the temp remains at 25 C.
So, there is only a little leeway on allowing the pH to rise.
If the pH remains at 7.6 then you do have quite a leeway with temperature rises (especially on these warm days) eg at 30 C the unionised ammonia would probably be 0.0084 mg/l.
With a reading of unionised ammonia of 0.006 at 25 C and pH 7.6 that indicates the total maximum ammonia possible in the tank is about 0.27 mg/l (that is an awful lot, but you'd need have a pH of over 11 to reach that
All that can be obtained from the spreadsheet I loaded on the article link above.
Irish Tropical Fish Society (ITFS) Member.
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I did a reverse calculation on the spreadsheet to estimate the total ammonia from your reading of unionised ammonia.
On the graphs on the spreadsheet, you can intrapolate to find the percentage (decimal fraction) of unionised at a given pH and temp.
Then I divided 1 by that fraction and multiplied it by your 0.006 reading of unionised to give the maximum total unionised.
Then that number (around 0.271) was entered into the main easy calculator on the first tab, and I simply altered the pH to give the output predictions of unionised at those pHs.
The reason I did the spreadsheet as it was and also gave the equations for calculations is that not everyone has pH and temperatures that can fit into a small neat box.
It's good to see someone is using it
the chemistry is complex, and the maths are complex though.It is also good that you are using the Seneye as intended.......using it to monitor trends in chemistry.
Maybe you could do an article review for the piece of kit at some stage.
ian
Irish Tropical Fish Society (ITFS) Member.
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