Purigen

Hi guys

I have Purigen to put in my tank when it cycles but I know you have to be very careful about which water conditioner you use with it as it can render it useless or worse, toxic. The warning that comes with it states: "Regeneration: Soak in a 1:1 bleach:water solution for 24 hours in a non-metalic container in a well ventilated area and away from children. Rinse well, then soak for 8 hours with a solution containing 2 tablespoons of ChlorGuard™, prime®, or equivalent dechlorinator per cup of water. Rinse well. Original color and full activity should now be restored and Purigen® is ready for reuse. Caution: some slime coat products may permanently foul Purigen® and render regeneration difficult. Do not reuse if odor of chlorine is detectable. In case of doubt, soak beads in small quantity of water and test for residual chlorine with a chlorine test kit."

The website goes on to state: "Only certain slime coat products will cause Purigen® to become toxic; the products that do this are amine based. Prime® and Safe™ are not amine based and so will not cause this problem. If you're curious, what happens is that the amine compounds can strongly bind to the resin, then when they (the amines) come into contact with any chlorine they will form chloramines which are highly toxic. We offer a Stress Coat product, StressGuard™, which is not amine based and so can be used in conjunction with Purigen.™"

So, I have a couple of questions please:
1. As I have been using stress coat + which is amine based, how many water changes will it take to get rid of it so I can add the purigen to the filter?
2. As Prime is eye-wateringly expensive in the UK, I was going to use API Tapwater Conditioner as it is cheap and being just a basic declorinator, does not contain any amine compounds (as confirmed to me by API) - will this be OK for everyday use as well as to regenerate the purigen?

Any ones experiences with purigen would be very welcome, I just dont want to do something that will harm my fish.

Thanks
Kirsty

I haven't used Purigen but I do use API tap water conditioner because I don't like those 'slime coat enhancers'. The only thing about that dechlorinator is that it does not detoxify ammonia, which itself is only a problem if your water company uses chloramine.
Just in case you don't know (and ignore this if you do  ) chloramine is a chlorine and an ammonia joined together. Dechlorinators split them up and remove the chlorine but leave the ammonia in the water. The filter will remove this ammonia but there will be some in the water till it has all been through the filter. Some dechlorinators contain a chemical to detoxify this ammonia till it has chance to get to the filter. API tap water conditioner does not do this. I have chlorine, not chloramine, in my tapwater, so that dechlorinator is fine for me.

The API stuff is also very economical. For tapwater will chlorine in it, the dose rate is 1 drop per 3.8 litres. I use 3 drops in my 8 litre refill bucket. I could probably get away with 2 drops but I am always wary of water companies deciding to overdose their chlorine.



Oh yes, I'll be a bit more cautious than Jim and say do a few more water changes. Two 50% water changes will only remove 75% (50% with the first one and half of the remaining 50% with the second)

Hi Kirsty,

I have Purigen to put in my tank

Can you tell me WHY do you HAVE to put Purigen into your tank? Purigen "eats" ammonia produced by fish and therefore will be starving your filter bacteria. When Purigen goes saturated, you will have a situation when all that fish produced waste will not be dealt with because your filter bacteria will be dead because of starving... Purigen is very good - but mostly for Marine tanks. Freshwater tanks can have it but for very limited period of time to remove organics (e.g. only a few hours). Why do you want to kill the bacteria in your filter which you have carefully grown during cycling? It does not make any sense to me... As I said Purigen is a very good product - but for MARINE tanks where biological filtration is somewhat different to freshwater tanks...

I should have done some research - I hadn't realised that's what purigen does. It's these antibiotics making my head feel a bit funny.
So using purigen is a bit like having zeolite in the filter.

Does your filter have any filter wool in it? That is the usual remedy for cloudy water - ie water with very tiny particles in it.
But I think I'd rather have bits in the water than insufficient bacteria.

Filter wool may not remove the cloudiness completely but it should reduce it. Buy a roll of unbranded filter wool/floss (whatever the seller calls it, the stuff marketed for ponds is cheaper and you get a big roll) and cut it to shape. It should fit snuggly right across the water flow with no gaps round the side for water to sneak past. Put it last in the water flow direction so it polishes the water just before it returns to the tank. You may find it gets mucky very quickly. Filter wool doesn't wash very well, it goes into holes; just throw it away and put new in. If you change it frequently there won't be enough time to build up more than a few bacteria so you shouldn't get rid of many when you change it.

If you want to continue with the purigen, put it last in the filter. That way the ammonia will get to the bacteria before the purigen. That will do less harm to the bacteria than putting the purigen first, though I still wouldn't use it in my tanks.

I am being a bit slow at the moment I'm afraid, my head isn't working properly (my husband would say that's normal  )

I agree with what Natalia says. Cloudy water from the tap is usually sediment from the pipes (did your water company flush the mains pipes recently?) or gas in the water. My in-laws' water used to come out of the tap looking like watery milk but when allowed to stand it would clear from the bottom upwards.

If your glass of water test as recommended by Natalia shows the water clears on standing, then it's something in the tank itself. The usual culprits are a bacterial bloom (not the filter species but others which live in the water column) and dust from the substrate (what is it and how did you wash it before setting the tank up?). A bacterial bloom usually clears by itself once the bacteria have consumed all the available food, and dust usually settles out on the bottom after a while, but can re-appear when the substrate is disturbed during cleaning.

I always take LFS recommendations with a pinch of salt. What they use in their tanks is not necessarily what i want in mine. If the chap uses purigen in the shop tanks, that is completely different from use in your tank. He may be relying on chemcal filtration in the shop instead of biological so he has no bacteria to starve.


And listen to Natalia on the subject of plants. She is the expert there.