Watch your local water

[Mugwump]

....the last few days our tap water has smelled heavily of chlorine......this wet weather, with fluctuating temps, has prompted some heavy municipal dosing....

[wsantia1]

....the last few days our tap water has smelled heavily of chlorine......this wet weather, with fluctuating temps, has prompted some heavy municipal dosing....

My water has sucked the last few times I tested it. I did a WC on Sunday and lost 2 fish (luckily no Altum), including an L144 male and an older Koi.

[wallace]

....the last few days our tap water has smelled heavily of chlorine......this wet weather, with fluctuating temps, has prompted some heavy municipal dosing....

My water has sucked the last few times I tested it. I did a WC on Sunday and lost 2 fish (luckily no Altum), including an L144 male and an older Koi.

Wow, that sucks. What was it do you think, extra chlorine.. or something else? Do you have to test it all the time and use more dechlorinator? Well water has its own set of problems, but it never changes from one day to the next like that.

[wsantia1]

....the last few days our tap water has smelled heavily of chlorine......this wet weather, with fluctuating temps, has prompted some heavy municipal dosing....

My water has sucked the last few times I tested it. I did a WC on Sunday and lost 2 fish (luckily no Altum), including an L144 male and an older Koi.

Wow, that sucks. What was it do you think, extra chlorine.. or something else? Do you have to test it all the time and use more dechlorinator? Well water has its own set of problems, but it never changes from one day to the next like that.

Don't know. I use a good dechlorinator (Safe) and my water is normally excellent. Might just have been a coincidence.

The only difference I saw was in the TDS levels. I am usually at 75 with my tap water but it is now running between 150 and 200.

That may sound like good water for most but since my tank water is less than 100 it might have been shock on a couple of weak fish.  

[wallace]

The thing is, you don't know what that extra 100ppm of TDS is comprised of. It might be something a lot worse than ordinary minerals, because it seems unlikely that a jump in minerals by itself would kill fish like that. After all, putting a simple dose of salt in the tank will suddenly increase the TDS to 500-1000ppm.

[BillT]

I used to run a fish facility at the U or Oregon. For a long time we were constantly worried about issues with the incoming water. We frequently were talking with the water company about what they were doing. Sometimes you can find a lot out doing this.

Our normal procedure was to run tap water through large charcoal filters to remove the chlorine. Normally this worked well, but during periods of a lot of rain, things would change. As the water became more turbid (more particles suspended in it) the water company would increase chlorine levels to kill the greater numbers of microbe in the water as well as to make up for the chlorine which would be used up reacting with increased amounts of organic materials in the water. They would also add flocculants (like alum) to the water to cause small particles to clomp together and fall or filter out of the water better. Unfortunately for us, the flocculant would also coat the charcoal in the filters and reduce its ability to remove the chlorine from the water. Chlorine would then get through to the fish and cause problems.

In addition, we would have seasonal changes in what ran off into the rivers from which the tap water came. this may have had to do with the amounts of rain/irrigation and the materials farmers (and others?) were putting on fields that got washed into streams. This was thought to cause seasonal changes in the breeding efficiency of the fish (not nearly as drastic a problem as the chlorine though).

Another problem in the area (which did not affect us) occurred when an area's surface water source was temporarily changed to a well water source. This resulted in a pH change in the water which killed a bunch of fish in a fish store.

Its often hard to tell what's going on.

Almost all our problems went away when we changed to using only water that went through our set of large RO machines. This required $$ for the ROs plus a system to resalt and buffer the water slightly, but almost completely eliminated this whole set of problems (which made for better and more efficient research).

[wallace]

...
Another problem in the area (which did not affect us) occurred when an area's surface water source was temporarily changed to a well water source. This resulted in a pH change in the water which killed a bunch of fish in a fish store.

This just recently happened in Portland, where Cryptosporidium was found in larger numbers than normally in their Bull Run source, so they switched from their very soft water (TDS<30) to groundwater having a much higher pH.

The flocculent's effect on the carbon isn't something I had thought about. This means that if you were to routinely use carbon to remove sudden increases in chlorine, you would want to have a good sediment filter on the upstream side.

[wsantia1]

I've always had good TDS water here and the fish were thriving so I haven't paid much attention to the water's other properties as long as the TDS remained low.

Last year we had a period of time where the TDS would fluctuate on any given day so I began testing TDS daily and did water changes on those good days.

I will place a call into the water company to see if I can get more info. Their website provides outdated information which is useless to me.

[BillT]

In Eugene, the water company used to have monthly reports you could easily get that showed what the water was like for the last month.
Then, for some reason they changed it to a YEARLY AVERAGE, which loses any information about short term changes!