What is prime?

[Tigerlilly]

I feel a little silly asking seeing as everyone seems to know what prime is and what it does but I don't.
I bought my figure 8 puffer a few days ago after thinking the tank was ready and cycled (seeing as I've had this one running about a year with other fish in it before etc..)
apparently not and the ammonia went up to around 0.5, not the worst I've known but I just don't like it being there at all it makes me feel bad...
So now I'm doing water changes everyday, do I need prime? I found it on ebay, "seachem prime" I'm guessing that's the stuff?
What does it do? will this stop me having to water change everyday?
Thanks

[trekenk]

Prime is the brand name of a product that removes chlorine from your water. Whether you use prime or another one of these products to do this job it is an important step in water changes. It doesn't stop you from having to do water changes but is a must for the health of your fish.

[Tigerlilly]

Ah, I do already use something that removes the chlorine when I do water changes, I just wondered about the ammonia part.. if it'd help in my "situation" the tank had goldfish in before so after they where gone I gave the filter a good cleaning (obviously some of the bacteria went too) plus adding salt for a brackish tank didn't help but I didn't know about that until after I did it and the ammonia, nitrate etc where all perfect

[Pufferpunk]

If you had just gone one step further in your search: http://www.seachem.com/Products/product ... Prime.html

[Tigerlilly]

Bahh sorry, I'm such a fool haha.. will read it now Thanks

[pufferpuggirl]

Thing is, even though there's several products on the market that are "water conditioners", if you compare how much Prime you need to use with most of the other products you will see that you only need a very small amount of Prime, which means it will last longer, and you won't spend as much in the long run. That's what I like about it. Before I found Prime, I was using that Hagen Aqua-Plus (and also "Cycle") - what a waste of money. Wish I had found Prime a long time ago.
I'm definitely sold on it, I like it so much that I bought a small bottle and took to my friend for him to try.

[RTR]

Prime's main value is that it does both chlorine and chloramines, and is quite concentrated. The only issue I have with it is that the standard ammonia tests are worthless after Prime use. It shows positive ammonia after any chloraminated water is treated (the majority of the US population has chloraminated water, eventually all folks on public utilities will have chloramines here).

API, Tetra, and the other brands need seriously to update their test, but to date they all pretend that the issue does not exist. It does and it is here to stay. A positive ammonia test with these old-fashioned worthless kits is that they read dangerous or hazardous levels when the water is perfectly safe. Folks panic when they should not.

[Tigerlilly]

I agree they do need to update the tests, one of ours said at first it'll be orange and you need to count the drops it takes to turn green...
It doesn't go orange or green no matter how many you put in, it goes bright yellow!

[Kungpaoshizi]

Prime sucks. The company even says "we don't know why it does that" in regards to removing nitrites and nitrates...
All I have to say is Amquel Plus rocks hands down. Never again will I touch Prime.

Check out this post, decide for yourself, but a company saying:

"is not well understood from a mechanistic standpoint"

"The most likely explanation is "

"I wish we had some more "concrete" explanation"

"This was unexpected chemically and thus initially we were not even aware of this, however we received numerous reports from customers stating that when they overdosed "

"We have received enough reports to date to ensure that this is no fluke"
_____________________________________________________________________________________
...let alone it only "detoxifies" for 48 hours, whereas Amquel+ I actually had some water with 40-80 nitrates ppm in, and after 2 weeks of leaving the water in a jar, only 5ppm showed up, which if my math is correct, is much better than "48 hours the chemical bonding falls apart". Oh but wait, it was unintended anyways
I did lots of testing, used probably a quarter of my liquid test kits lol...
I just love though how they say 'reports from customers when they overdosed'.... Uhhh ok, so, why not adjust the instructions to reflect that? I mean really, an overdose to Joe Bob is different from a Curt Cobain overdose...
But ya, I did try the "5x dose" for a 'nitrite emergency' like they say on the bottle, and it didn't do a dam thing...didn't affect anything else for that matter.

I took it back to Petsmart, and after showing her the response from Seachem she said "oh, well I know a lot of people who swear by it, I guess it just didn't work for your setup!"
Uhh ok.. lol

http://www.seachem-labs.org/support/for ... php?p=7767

I thought it was interesting, I'm sure it does all the intended stuff correctly, but I think it's bad business to advertise something that they never "proved" in a lab. Only thing that Amquel+ doens't do is heavy metals. But they're 'water conditioner' does that, virus/parasite inhibitors, includes electrolytes, and has vitamins...

Decide for yourself. But I do have to say Seachem's Purigen rocks... so they're good for something.

[Brent]

Prime "does that," simply because it is only making the ammonia safe, not actually getting rid of it. Prime does /not/ suck.

[Dadof4]

A lot of products start off not knowing why they do certain things (silly putty is a great example and so is Cialis). Prime was made to detoxify chlorine and chloramines and had the added bonus of binding with ammonia and forming a less harmful ammonium and the added added bonus of detoxifying nitrite and nitrate.

Any scientific process is based on the principals (RTR s much better at explaining this than I am) of 1) Deciding there is a need, 2) Diagnosing the exact need, 3)developing a solution to that problem, 4) Releasing said solution to problem, and 5) re-evaluating the solution, ie: what works, what doesn't work, and any neat surprises and why this happens. The neat surprises usually come from people like us that incidentally discover them, not from the scientists that originally developed the product. Most products never get past the re-evaluation phase, they are always finding new things about them, this is where Prime is at. They developed it for one thing and happily discovered that is is good for other things too.

In case you're wondering, Silly putty was originally designed as a rubber substitute in WWII and Cialis, it was developed as a miracle medication to treat pulmonary hypertension (a usually terminal high blood pressure in the lung circulation) and men that used it were pleasantly surprised by it's side effects...Things don't suck because they have unexpected side effects.

[Pufferpunk]

Like my figuring out all the great uses of vitamin C?

[Dadof4]

Beautiful example!

[Nick]

Ask RTR about his opinions of Amquel sometime... I believe he had some input on it in another thread.

[pufferpuggirl]

I trust Prime and would never consider buying anything else -- ever. It works for me, and that's what matters.