Water quality from the city

So Brad and I were performing our regularly scheduled water changes on his cichlid tank and my goldfish tank. The next day, he had several dead cichlids and all of my goldfish were covered in ich and lying on the bottom of the tank. We haven't had a disease outbreak in years and I suspect there was something wrong with the water out of the tap. Has anyone else experienced this? I treated the goldies with cupramine, added a heater and an extra airstone. Did a 50% water change. It has been three days and I see no change in them. Brad is still losing fish with a few that have developed pop eye.
I added two tablespoons of salt to the goldies today, one is lying on it's side and probably won't make it. I'm pretty mad because I'm fairly certain it was a ph spike or chloramine dump from the city. Of course when I have questioned them before they just say it's the same. You never get an announcement or warning when they are working on pipes or flushing hydrants.

I did a 25 percent water change yesterday and used fresh tap water for refill on my 2 10 gallons as well as my 5 gal cory bucket, nobody is sick or different today.
sometimes in the past i have had similar problems and thought it was because of the difference in water temps... raising my tank temps a notch seems to keep some of those illnesses at bay. Don't know what that would do to goldfish or other types of fish besides gups. That and about a teaspoon of salt per 10 gal of water for the gups seems to help. many guppy breeders use more like a tablespoon per gallon!!!!!! don't know what the salt would do for/to other kinds of fish. Do all your fish share the same water supply? do you use the same siphons, buckets and other tools in all the tanks? Sometimes a seemingly perfectly healthy fish can go through isolation and be added to a setup and bring all sorts of things with it... when they first started importing asian guppies this happened. they were immune to some virus illnesses which they carried, were introduced into tanks and it knocked the american bred guppies for a loop. Master breeders all over the country lost thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stock. Stan shubel wrote a piece on controlling epidemics in fish rooms. I don't know if it is still on his website. best wishes

Not sure what city you are referring to, but I live in Normal and nothing unusual has happened with my fish lately. All 30 of my tanks are on the same filter system so I test anything that goes into the system first, including new water. To hopefully prevent disease outbreak, I quarantine any new fish for a week, and have a UV sterilizer to hopefully catch anything that gets in.

So far so good (fingers crossed).........

DavidZ

Not sure this has anything to do with the problems you're experiencing, especially as you live in Normal and I live in Bloomington (may get water from different sources?). But a couple of months ago after a water change of about 40%, I lost a bunch of fish. I was freaking out when several started dying, trying to "fix" whatever I could think of with the water, and concluded (from my newly acquired and limited knowledge about water parameters) that maybe it was the PH being so high. I figured since I used all tap water for the change (after using 5 gallons of RO from the shop the time before); maybe it was too much of a difference (?). I called the Bloomington water company and eventually got to speak with one of the people in the "quality" part of it... and he said they keep their pH at 9 to keep the pipes in good order (or something like that). Anyways... I'm sorry about your problems and wish I could help.

On a bright note... all the angelfishes I got from you the other day are doing nicely in their new big home. But now I'm afraid to do a water change (which it's time for - was going to do today).

What I am specifically referring to is when the city dumps extra chloramine into the system for the town of Normal. I use aquasafe which is essentially effective at treating chlorine but not chloramine. Chloramine is chlorine bonded to ammonia so when you treat it with sodium thiosulfate (aquasafe) it leaves the ammonia behind. Not usually a problem if you have a good bio filter going however, if too much is left behind you get ammonia poisoning or ph shock or stressed fish. At any rate it seems to happen in the spring and fall occasionally. I dont' have the luxury or space to run a tank of water and season it before doing water changes.
Becky, go ahead and do your water changes, you will be fine. You have a higher PH in Bloomington which means your water is more stable and does not fluctuate on ph levels.

Thanks for the info, Gina. I'm feeling a little better about going ahead with the water change now. I'm using Seachem's Prime for my water conditioner, and it says it removes or "neutralizes" chloramines, so maybe I won't have an issue with that (hopefully). I've got a big bottle of it... I'd gladly give you some to get you over the hump if needed (and you thought it would do any good). Just say the word.

Becky,

Seachem Safe is just the powdered version of Prime, but it's a lot cheaper. I use Prime as well and going to switch to Safe once my big jug runs out (probably in December - lol).

DavidZ

Thank you for the info, David. Hmmm... yes, I think I remember you guys discussing that at the meeting now that you mention it. I'd already kind of forgotten that valuable little tidbit. I just hope I'll remember it in about 5 years... when my jug is empty!

I have had issues with fish flashing over the last couple of days. I assumed it was a new fish I added having ich, but I have seen no ich, just flashing. I am super sensitive to ich since I have loaches and they are really finickey about the treatment. I treat at the first sign of flashing so that I can treat with a half dose. I also raise my temp so that the ich dies naturally. It could be high ammonia though causing skin irritation on my loaches. The other fish don't seem nearly as affected. If it is high ammonia my raising the tank temp could be just adding stress to a tank that has already stressed fish.

I also lost a Monte a week or so ago. Everyhting was going along fine then all of the sudden I have a dead fish, but I am not experienced at keeping wild type livebearers so I wrote it off to me not providing optimal conditions, or aggression within the group.

Now I am going to have to test and see exactly how high my ammonia is. I never have ammonia problems and I don't overfeed so I have gotten out of the habit of testing.