Ascorbic acid to remove chloramine

Has anyone tried removing chloramine with ascorbic acid?

 

thats vitamin c!

 

Yep, it removes chlor and lowers ph, and is good for fish apparently. I will be trying it as soon as my vitamin c arrives.

 

Does anyone know if this Ascorbic Acid DOES lower the pH and if so - how do you use it ??

 

@eros111: I would advice against it, there are perfectly good water conditioners out there that we know works. Also you will need massive amounts to absorb the Chloramine and by doing so you will drop your PH as well. You will need around 1000mg just to treat 50 litres of water which will cost a small fortune. The issue with using just sodium thiosulfate and I would assume(for what I've read) its the same with vitamin C, is if you have chloramines. If chloramines are present it does only half the job. The compound chloramine is basically a ammonia ion and chlorine ion combined in the form of NH2CL. This stabilizes the chlorine ion so it does not simply evaporate like it would in the free state.

It also brings up the problem of using conventional 'simple' dechlorinators, if you neutralize chloramine with just sodium thiosulfate the result is you release that ammonia ion. So now the chloramine is gone, but essentially their is an equal concentration of ammonia now present. Ammonia being toxic as well, many dechlors these days have added ingredients to effectively minimize the ammonia toxicity until the biofilter deals with it. Basically it comes down to which is more toxic chloramines or ammonia and that gets much more complicated since ammonia's toxicity is related to pH.

 

I find that Sodium thiosulfate and vitamin c are both great and are super cheap, if you are changing small amounts of water I would not worry at all about the ammonia. If you are changing large amounts 50% plus then run a bio filter in the new water prior to adding water to your tank. At low ph the ammonia is not as bad. My tap water treated with sodium thiosulfate results in .25 mg/l this is eaten by my bio filter in a day. Most if not all store bought dechlorinators contain sodium thiosulfate,


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I would say give it go, but maybe just first test it seperately from fish. Ascorbic acid can drastically drop the pH of your water if it has a very low hardness (KH). If you have a reasonable hardness it would actually be cheap way of dropping the pH and getting rid of the chloramine.

If you have a stable system then the amonia should be taken care of quite easily, but as Swagasaurus and rixtrix had mentioned with higher water changes this might be challenge if doing large water changes and your water contains lots of chloramine.

Personally I like it when people experiment and would like to hear your feedback. As mentioned first test seperately and see how it effects your pH... and if you can test for chlorine and ammonia even better. Then only take it to your fish tank... so that you do not loose lots of fish while trying this. Best of luck and would like to hear how it goes.

 

Following with interest.


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