Carbon Block Filters

I was just reading TFH from October 2012, and an article on setting up a fishroom said that you can filter out chlorine and chloramine using a carbon block filter. I could see advantages and disadvantages to it. To me it would be nice not to have to worry about if Normal adds extra chloramine. With chemical treatment you are still adding the chlorine and chloramine to the system they are just either bonded to other chemicals or broken down into something else. Filtration would remove it entirely. The disadvantage I see is that I would think it would also filter out trace elements the fish and plants want. Has anyone tried this, if so how well does it work for you?

I have never tried it but If you let your water set for a day or two that will also work.

Mark

Does that work, I have heard it only works for chlorine, and that chloramine doesn't offgas? I don't remeber where I heard that, it could have been from someone trying to sell me treatment chemicals.

OK I did a litle research and it says that chloramine will offgas, but it takes much longer. What I read said that the halflife (amount of time for the concentration to be reduced by half) in boiling water is 1.8 hours for chlorine, and 26.6 hours for chlorimine. If you use the Navy's definition of removal this would mean 5x halflife which is 9 hours for chlorine, and 133 hours for chloramine if you tried to boil it off. Since most of us won't boil it off I ratio'd it out. If you let chlorinated water sit for 24 hours you would need to let chloramine water sit for 14.8 days to reach an equivalent reduction if the offgasing remains true at less than boiling.

Carbon absorbs ammonia, medicine, trace elements that plant and shrimp use. I cannot find what trace elements exactly but I imagine iron and any other metal. It supposedly removes chlorine and chloramine but just how much or how fast is the question. I have also been told that if I run carbon filters I would not have to treat water with chlorine remover. I do not feel brave enough to test that out.

Also what doesn't make sense is that if it absorbs trace elements that shrimp need, then why do they sell carbon tubes for shrimp homes?

The way the article was talking about it you could run it through the carbon filter to filter out chlorine and chloramine and put the output directly in the tank. It was in a part of the article talking about an automated fill system. It seems kind of wild to me, but maybe its not so out there.