Dave Thebrewguy
New member
Yes, I know, we would like to have "no" copper in our tanks. In reality though, we all have "some." Natural sea water is said to have about 0.003 mg/L copper and that may vary a bit from place to place. Anyone with a brass fitting anywhere in their water line probably has more copper than that. How much then is "too much?"
12 days ago I had a mishap, while pulling down my light I accidently dropped the wire from the power supply into the tank. It went unnoticed until I went to reinstall the fixture, about an hour after the power came on. By then the resulting electralysis caused about a half inch of 16 gauge stranded wire to disolve into the tank. I have since done what I can to remove and/or eliminate the copper. All corals were removed from the tank and are temporarily housed elsewhere. I lost a few turbo snails but the rest are alive and well. Nessarius are said to be more sensitive to copper than turbos but those seem to be OK.
So far I have added fresh carbon, plus 2 "units" of Chemi-pure. Water changes almost daily, 12 gal a couple times and 6 gal about 6 times in a 85 gal system. Initially, I only had a API test kit to work with and there was no color change at all. The first color above "0" was 0.25mg/L, that's still pretty high and being somewhere between "0" and "0.25" is not vert comforting. Last night I picked up a Seachem Multitest. The color chart is continuously varied over a range from 0.0 to 1.0 mg/L so it should be possible to get a fairly accurate reading... in theory. I ran tests in 2 of the 6 cells. Even after an extended period it was impossible to tell if there was any color development I filled the cell between those 2 with tank water and under a bright light there is a very slight difference in color, it is so slight that the best I can do with the color chart is to determine that it is <0.1 mg/L but I can't say how much less.
At another LFS, it was suggested that shrimp would be very sensitive to copper and that if they lived more than a few hours I was probably OK. He suggested glass shrimp, because they are cheap, but he only had them in fresh water and I'd have to try to acclimate them. I got 4 and put 2 in the tank in question and 2 in the tank that now holds my corals. All were alive after slowly acclimating for 4 hours and were still OK when I went to bed a few hours later. In the morning I had a dead one stuck to the intake of a powerhead and couldn't find the other in the temporary tank, the other tank had one live and one dead in the confined space I had set up. After work I found the second one dead in the temporary tank, the remaining shrimp had escaped in the big tank and I haven't seen him since. I assume he was eaten.
So, I may or may not have copper remaining in my tank, at somewhere between 0.0 and 0.1 mg/L a glass shrimp survived >15 hours before being eaten and another that was acclimated the same way with untainted water died in the same period of time.
I'm at a loss as far as how to proceed from here. Any ideas?
12 days ago I had a mishap, while pulling down my light I accidently dropped the wire from the power supply into the tank. It went unnoticed until I went to reinstall the fixture, about an hour after the power came on. By then the resulting electralysis caused about a half inch of 16 gauge stranded wire to disolve into the tank. I have since done what I can to remove and/or eliminate the copper. All corals were removed from the tank and are temporarily housed elsewhere. I lost a few turbo snails but the rest are alive and well. Nessarius are said to be more sensitive to copper than turbos but those seem to be OK.
So far I have added fresh carbon, plus 2 "units" of Chemi-pure. Water changes almost daily, 12 gal a couple times and 6 gal about 6 times in a 85 gal system. Initially, I only had a API test kit to work with and there was no color change at all. The first color above "0" was 0.25mg/L, that's still pretty high and being somewhere between "0" and "0.25" is not vert comforting. Last night I picked up a Seachem Multitest. The color chart is continuously varied over a range from 0.0 to 1.0 mg/L so it should be possible to get a fairly accurate reading... in theory. I ran tests in 2 of the 6 cells. Even after an extended period it was impossible to tell if there was any color development I filled the cell between those 2 with tank water and under a bright light there is a very slight difference in color, it is so slight that the best I can do with the color chart is to determine that it is <0.1 mg/L but I can't say how much less.
At another LFS, it was suggested that shrimp would be very sensitive to copper and that if they lived more than a few hours I was probably OK. He suggested glass shrimp, because they are cheap, but he only had them in fresh water and I'd have to try to acclimate them. I got 4 and put 2 in the tank in question and 2 in the tank that now holds my corals. All were alive after slowly acclimating for 4 hours and were still OK when I went to bed a few hours later. In the morning I had a dead one stuck to the intake of a powerhead and couldn't find the other in the temporary tank, the other tank had one live and one dead in the confined space I had set up. After work I found the second one dead in the temporary tank, the remaining shrimp had escaped in the big tank and I haven't seen him since. I assume he was eaten.
So, I may or may not have copper remaining in my tank, at somewhere between 0.0 and 0.1 mg/L a glass shrimp survived >15 hours before being eaten and another that was acclimated the same way with untainted water died in the same period of time.
I'm at a loss as far as how to proceed from here. Any ideas?
