Ammonia Test question

[intarsiabox]

I just added water to my new tank two weeks ago and although I've never actually tested for ammonia before (just waited a month in the past before adding livestock) I was curious to see what happens. So I bought an API kit and have been testing for a week now. I get the same result every day, 0.50ppm. It shows 0ppm after the first minute but if I wait the 5 minutes as directed I get 0.50ppm. I thought this was odd so I tested some plain tap water and got the same results, 0ppm after 1 minute and 0.50ppm after 5 minutes. Is my test kit faulty? Nitrates test at 0 right now and I've been adding Seachem Stability for a week now as well. Still going to wait awhile yet before adding any livestock but just curious about the results.

[Beverly]

You're in Sh. Park, right? Do you folks get your water from Edmonton, or do you have your own water treatment plant?

If Sh. Park's water source is Edmonton, the water is treated with chloramine which is a compound composed of chlorine and ammonia. It's much more stable than chlorine. Prime will neutralize the chlorine, but I'm not exactly sure what it does to the ammonia. Prime might change the ammonia to ammonium which is not harmful to fish. But I don't know if ammonium will test positive for ammonia. I suspect the test kit is reading the ammonium as ammonia, though.

What do you have in your tank besides water? (Sorry for the dumb question.) What did you treat the water with?

[intarsiabox]

We get our water from the Edmonton treatment plant I believe. I put Prime in the water when I filled the tank as well as in the top off water. I have a bunch of little brittle stars that are running around so I haven't killed them off.

[syncro]

Wait until the test kit no longer detects ammonia.

I believe Beverly is right - Prime will bind to ammonia converting it to a less harmful form. Many ammonia test kits, including API, test for total ammonia which includes this bound/converted ammonia. So your inhabitants may be safe even if the test kits reads > 0. Seachem has a "ammonia multi-test" kit that can measure both free ammonia and total ammonia.

Any ammonia, bound or not, indicates the cycle is still in progress.