Reef Discussion
You might be able to find a photo of her here Ken & Jen Host Team Victoria if you are interested :)
One word of caution about buying stuff at these sorts of places. I don't know the laws down there so if I'm off base, speak up. Be very careful of where the items you are buying are stored, a quick sniff should tell you if there's an odd odour about them, if so, pass on it. Up here all sorts of things are shipped and stored with chemicals they shouldn't be which is why I'm very leery of buying chemicals on the cheap. This is especially true of just about everything being stored in proximity to pool chlorine. Pool chlorine in very small doses is deadly to the creatures in our tanks, I'd hate to read about someone losing everything because of this.
That's a fair caution, but a lot of these dosing chemicals are stored in sealed containers, that have sealed bags inside of them, containing the chemicals. Pool chlorine is one of those scents that just gets everywhere and overpowers everything else. Any store that sells it will smell like it in the area it's kept.
Chances are the chlorine won't get through a sealed container with a sealed bag in it. I mean it COULD happen, but I doubt it. We'd have heard about it by now with the amount of people that buy their stuff from pool stores.
I used to work for a large, in WA, pet, pool and garden suplier back in the day and we had alot of "bad luck" with our fish. All fresh water.
I suggested that maybe storing all the garden chemicals in close proximity (2m and over) was the cause. We found we needed to move all garden chemicals more than 10 metres away before we started to have success keeping them. This was the only variable in the situation, nothing else changed as we were using sound husbandry techniques.
Don't think that's true. It can't get through glass. It also couldn't get through a semipermeable membrane with pores smaller than the chlorine molecule.
If it COULD, then our RO/DI filters would be absolutely effing worthless.
So I think that M's dad was using more than a little bit of hyperbole there.
Chlorine will destroy your RO membrane. The prefilters on your RO system are there to remove sediment that can clog your membrane and the carbon filter will absorb chlorine before it reaches the membrane.
As a plumber I used to return every year to replace a length of copper pipe that ran through a customers pool shed. The pool shed had fairly poor ventilation and housed a gas powered pool heater, filter and pump system. The other half of the shed was just a tool/garden shed and the pipe ran through the whole length but would only corrode on the side with the pool equipment. The customer also kept buckets of chlorine in the shed. The pipe would corrode to about the thickness of foil within a year and need replacing at the start of the pool season.
The first time we replaced the pipe and noticed the corrosion we investigated everything we could think of. We insulated the pipe with expanded foam and our electrician grounded all pipework and metal in the shed to prevent galvanic corrosion and we thought we were fine.
The next year the same problem occured. We replaced the pipe again, this time with pipe designed for hostile environments with a seamless "impervious" insulation and had our electrician inspect for current leakage and I tested and serviced the heater and resealed the flue. Again, we should have been fine.
The third year, when I returned the customer was complaining that the pipe had now started leaking in the other end of the shed. When i got there the pipe had in fact corroded inside the impervious sleeve and the water was leaking out the end in the other half of the shed. This time I was really puzzled as I had never seen anything like this before and everything I had learnt about corrosion in plumbing told me this shouldn't be happening. I had noticed the chlorine buckets before but didn't think it was a problem because (edit: all but one of) the buckets were sealed with a sealed bag inside. Other than replacing the pipe and rechecking our previous work the only thing we did was to remove the chlorine buckets. There has been no problem since.
There is not enough evidence to say 100% that the chlorine was the source of the corrosion but the only thing that stopped it from happening was removing it. I have since seen similar corrosion in a couple of wineries where they were using chlorine products for cleaning.
I know this is a long post so for anyone that made it this far, my advice is be wary of where you store chlorine products. Chlorine is incredibly corrosive and gets in (almost) everywhere!
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I have yet to see chlorine get through the plastic that's used to store it.
Just sayin'.
Treating chlorine and chlorine compounds with respect is common sense. Behaving as if the sky is falling every time "chlorine" gets mentioned is counter-productive.
Additionally, correlation is not causation.
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I understand stats.
A single data point cannot be correlated to anything. Who mentioned correlation anyway?
I simply relayed a personal experience where chlorine was stored in a hot, humid area with poor natural ventilation and a nearby copper pipe was repeatedly suffering structural failure due to corrosion despite measures taken by highly qualified, experienced tradesmen to prevent it. I also noted that the only way we managed to prevent the problem was by the removal of the chlorine. At no point did I blame the corrosion on the chlorine, there could be hundreds of other things that changed that year which may have allowed the pipe to endure.
I might add that given the decades of combined technical/trade experience among the people that worked on the job, all of whom agreed that the corrosion was of chemical origin and was incredibly aggressive and that there is a strong case for the chlorine to be blamed.
Nor have I. I haven't ever looked at it that closely and I didn't say that it does...
I thought people might have guessed that one of the buckets of chlorine had been opened in order to access the contents... Also I should have mentioned that this pool was almost olympic sized and the pump shed was only just big enough that we could legally allow the heater to run under the then current Australian standards for gas installations. Further, the calculations for the volume of the shed and heater sizing (from the standards) do not account for space occupied by the other equipment.
There were a number of factors that seemed, on face value, to contribute to aggressive corrosion in the shed but, again, when we removed the chlorine we appeared to fix the problem...
Just sayin'
I like you guys, you argue like Canadians and thats a compliment. I learn more reading threads on this forum than any other. As to tips and tricks, the 13mm black irigation pipe is cheap and fits over most larger style airpumps like airlabs and LP's. In the same isle you can find T and elbows, as well as screw in connectors and taps for standard 4mm airline tubing, and also elbows and T's. This all becomes very useful if you decide to setup a growout setup thats filtered by airpowered sponge filters or UGF all powered of an airpump or 2.
I should have worded that to say into any room. I don't think many places would do a total seal on the room where their chemicals are stored and store them separately. When you walk into a pool supply place the first thing you smell is chlorine.
When I replied, in my head it sounded right. At the time I was getting ready to head off to somewhere to collect evidence that chemical weapons were being used. I was picking his brain about safe guards for myself and my team because we had no idea what the complete list of the chemicals were that were being used.
When I replied, in my head it sounded right. At the time I was getting ready to head off to somewhere to collect evidence that chemical weapons were being used. I was picking his brain about safe guards for myself and my team because we had no idea what the complete list of the chemicals were that were being used.
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