Warning: Plant fertilizer test positive for chlorine

I just had a very frightening experience.

Added some Sera Florena Plant fertilizer (0-0-4) to my tanks and was just about to turn off the lights when I heard my goldies were splashing, jumping and going crazy. The fishes' behavior was erratic and something was not right.

I immediately grabbed my water test strips and found that there was high levels of chlorine present in the tanks. After I added the recommended Seachem Prime dose, the water test showed that there was still chlorine present. The dose was increased to 3 x normal and the levels of chlorine was lower. Only after the dose was increased to 5 x normal, all chlorine was neutralised. I also tested the plant fertiliser itself and the test strip indicated high levels of chlorine are present.

Something similar happened a few months ago but blamed high levels of chloremines on the municipal water since the Sera Florena was added after water change. Unfortunately I only tested for chlorine two days later when a few of my fishes died, including my fav Pleco named Jar Jar whom came to greet me every time, I miss her . Needless to say all the good bacteria in the tanks where killed and I had to start cycling the tanks from scratch.

Please don't start disposing of all your Sera Florena and dos the head-office with hate-mail. I'm just giving this info as a word of caution. Test your water after you use the product.

There is no expiration date on the product, only CH 00243 04931129 which looks more like a batch number.

It is possible that the product I used has expired or that it is just a bad batch. It may even be a false positive.

So apply caution and keep your fishy friends happy.

 

Was it this

wonder if that K is not from KCL ... that would be odd because I would expect K2O

 

You are correct, that is the product I used. Ingredients are:

• potassium chloride
• iron chloride
• manganous sulfate
• boric acid
• sodium molybdate
• cobalt chloride
• EDTA
• sodium hydroxide

I only noticed afterwards that it differs from the "new" version listed on Sera's site.

 

That is scary.
I wonder how many people have unknowingly reset their tanks every time they dosed fertiliser.

 

I agree, its like a horror movie in slow motion...

Not to even mention the cascading effect of ammonia and nitrites saturating the poor fishes already weakened by the chlorine.

No wonder Sera silently replaced the fertiliser with a "new" & "improved" version.

Think of all the casualties due to this unintended mishap...

 

Interestingly, just after reading this, I was in a LFS, and saw they had 2 bottles of the old Sera Florena on their shelves.
I had a look at the packaging, and saw that there are no fish anywhere on the packaging.
There was a mention of various chemicals shown imposed over supposedly healthy plant leaves, but no fish or other livestock.

There were no warnings on any of the packaging that it is not intended to be used with livestock in the tank, or that it could be detrimental to livestock.

Scary indeed.

 

yeah cheap salts ? .. and little chance of them interacting with each other during manufacturing and storage.

• potassium chloride
• iron chloride
• cobalt chloride

I suspect this was ok for the salt guys .. and got lumped into freshwater at some point.

Later Ferdie

 

Yew... @Toy .. thank God you noticed the fish's behaviour in time and no losses
Thanks for the warning

 

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