Weird Source of Ammonia

[brianacooper11]

I've been battling ammonia in my 28g nano for about three weeks, since tearing it down and moving it to the basement. Frequent water changes were not bringing ammonia down, and in trying to get to the bottom of things, I discovered my basement tap water had over 0.5 ppm ammonia/amonnium (salt contributed zero). My RODI setup reduces that some, but the majority was still making it through. On a lark, I tested the upstairs tap, and it's ZERO!

I'm trying to nail down the source of ammonia that is only in part of the house's plumbing, but I can only think of one thing. I plumbed in a utility sink in the basement in anticipation of a 200 gallon tank. The plumbing was soldered/sweated. In the process of sweating the new junctions, I had to battle a steady drip, so I shoved some bread into the leaking ends to stop the drip so I could melt the solder, and that part worked like a charm. After wrapping things up, I got clogs downstream of the new junctions, at the utility sink and the washer/dryer. I used whole wheat bread, not white bread, so lots of it didn't dissolve finely enough into the water. Big mistake. I spent a lot of time cleaning bits in the utility sink and washer and dryer, but eventually got rid of it all (I thought).

So my questions, folks are:

1) Anyone familiar enough with the chemistry of baking to know if bread produces ammonia when it breaks down?

2) Can anyone think of another source of ammonia, that might not affect the whole house?

I also have a water softener, but I checked like 5 times that it was plumbed correctly, and all the faucets are downstream of it.

 

[mcgyvr]

Your DI stage is exhausted and should be replaced..
No ammonia should make it through..

Whatever bread was left is gone/flushed throuhg/broken down by now..

Also.. what test kit are you using? Many are notorious for showing false readings of ammonia..

 

[brianacooper11]

I'm using the API kit. I hear you about the false readings. I'd taken the 0.5 ppm to be 'baseline' color, but that upstairs tap came out a beautiful pee yellow, so I'm second guessing that it's a test problem.


Ammonia spiked to 4 ppm (!!), so I just did a bucket brigade from the upstairs tap. I undid the upper rockwork, rummaged around in the sand and found a dead sea cucumber. Going to do a second 90% change to see if I can get the ammonia below 0.5 ppm and get rid of the junk I just stirred up.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Finding the dead sea cucumber solves one problem. Now your tank can be back under control.

But the RO/DI in the basement should take care of any ammonia in the tap water. I'm with mcgyvr, if the bread thing was more than a week ago and you've since flushed the system (doing laundry and such) then that shouldn't be an issue.