The Puffer Forum

Hello, I was talking to the girl that works at my LFS about water quality... I have a well at home but I always went to the next town to have town water and put some Prime in it for the chlorine. I have tried putting water from my well in the aquarium before but lost control of the nitrites within 3days to the same extent where the town water would last 2weeks for the same parameters... That was like 10years back that I tried it...

So the lady at the LFS told me if my water is drinkable it should be safe for a fish, so she told me to bring a sample and she'd test it. So I did and she said the water's quality is perfect so should be good. I didn't ask any parameters but I can test it to have some for you if needed.

So here's my question... if I'm using well water, could it be that if I still put Prime in it is what causes the parameters to go out of wack??? Obviously no chlorine is in my well, it's a salt machine, no charcoal or anything else...

Thank you

For all of that, why don't you just invest in a liquid test kit, then you can check your well water as it is, and regularly check your aquarium water for any issues (or no issues).
https://www.amazon.com/API-Freshwater-M ... 58&sr=8-10
Then you'll know.
Prime is unlikely to cause any issues, but why guess at all with this stuff.
It's always amazed me how people will invest as much money as they do in their kit & fish, yet won't spend the thirty bucks to properly monitor the water quality.

I do have a test kit, the question was when I used well water the water quality would go bad faster then when I am using chloronated town water. I was just wondering why this may be...

Dechlor is not necessary with well water & it is perfect for BW fish. What do you mean by water quality going bad?

I am redoing the test now with my new fahaka... but back in the days I had a figure 8 in a 26gallons tank, salanity was 1.004-5.
If I used my well water, which has no chlorine in it, with some prime, after 3 days the nitrite and nitrate would go up to the point I needed a water change. But if I used town water, that contains chlorine, with some prime, to end up at the same level of nitrite and nitrates it would take almost 2 weeks.

I didn't understand nor did I try to find out why it was doing it, I just stopped using it.

Now I'm trying it and the tank was filled up with town water and I changed roughly 40% for well water and it seems still stable...

Like I said that was like 8years ago, so I don't remember the exact specs but I didn't move so it's the same well water.

So the question was, could it be that by using prime when I didn't need to remove chlorine made the water test bad???

I don't think Prime is the cause. It detoxifies unwanted chemicals/metabolites.

So if I manage to use my well water, I will test every odd days, should I add prime to the water when I change it or is it worthless to do so?

It is a waste of $$$ to use regularly.