What do you do if you don’t have water conditioner or if you can’t use it, as is the case with chelated copper medication?
Are you stuck with having to buy water in bottles? No, thankfully, you aren’t, whether you ran out of conditioner or are just trying to save a few bucks, there are options.
With certain medications it may be necessary to avoid the use of any reducing agent, but substances that ‘remove’ chlorine are all reducing agents so far as I understand how they work, so what are the options in that case?
I have done a fair bit of in depth research into this topic and there certainly are some options, though most of them require time & some effort plus preplanning.
Alternative chemicals
Should you happen to have vitamin C handy, either in the form of ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate, it will quickly reduce chlorine in water. You may only think of it as a vitamin but it is a chemical and one you might actually have around.
The dosage is 40mg per gallon for chlorine and a little more if it’s chloramine. The extra for chloramine may not be strictly necessary but since I could find no data to support either the same dose as for chlorine or extra, a little extra seems wise if only out of an abundance of caution. Vit C reduces chlorine virtually instantaneously and the amount used poses no known risks to livestock and is soon gone anyway.
As an example, for fifty gallons, you’d need 2 grams of Vit C (thoroughly dissolved) for chlorine or 2.5 - 3 grams for chloramine. I did not try to figure out how cost effective it may be compared to water conditioner but it’s easy enough - just figure out how many doses there are in a container (per gallon) for both the Vit C and your conditioner and see how much a dose costs for each.
Ideally your Vitamin C will be in powder form but if not, fear not. Tablets can be crushed. Capsules can be opened and have powder inside. Ascorbic acid is mildly acidic and might have a minor effect on pH if you have very low KH. Sodium ascorbate is a buffered form of Vitamin C and should not affect pH so it may be the preferable form for some. .
Non reducing dechlorination methods pretty much all take time.
Fresh carbon
If you have fresh carbon, you can very easily filter out chlorine simply by running the water through the carbon as you fill a bucket. This one is pretty quick and easy - if need be put the carbon in a clean kitchen sieve and just run tap water through it.
This is the only non chemical method that’s reasonably quick.
Unfortunately, it simply does not work with chloramine. For carbon to adsorb chloramines it has to be a very specially processed version of carbon, known as catalytic carbon.
Catalytic carbon is costly & quite difficult to source and is definitely not something you could get at a LFS or hardware or big box joint.
Boiling water
This will remove chlorine and chloramine but it takes a loooooooooong time - no less than 20 minutes at a full rolling boil for chlorine and substantially longer than that for chloramine - at least 90 minutes or longer. So if you need more than a few gallons, it would take ages and ages plus use up a lot of energy.
If you try it, you need to keep the pot covered or evaporation will make you crazy as you’ll find you need to keep topping up & then restarting the timing all over again.
But it does work.
It also softens hard water because it changes calcium bicarbonates into insoluble calcium carbonate ( that delightful yuck known as scale when it accumulates in a kettle or coffee maker). Depending on what species you keep, this might pose a problem.
Aging water or Natural outgassing
Any keeper of a certain age or greater surely must remember leaving their water out to ‘age’ as we called it, to let chlorine leave the water of its own volition.
Chlorine is volatile so it wants to be a gas - so it outgasses from water relatively quickly. This property is what led water treatment companies to switch to the use of chloramines instead, as they are a little less volatile and thus remain in the water for a longer period of time.
There are a surprising number of folks out there that seem to think chloramine cannot outgas, but this is simply not true. It just takes longer than it does for chlorine.
In fact, what you smell from a swimming pool isn’t chlorine gas, which seems to be what most assume it must be.
But it’s actually chloramine gas, not chlorine and it is produced by the reaction between the chlorine in the pool water & bacteria & other organics it comes into contact with.
Chloramine gas may not be quite as dangerous as chlorine gas is, but it’s very irritating and people such as lifeguards and others who have prolonged exposure to it can become very sensitized to it.
So aging water works no matter if it’s for chlorine or chloramines but the time needed differs.
For chlorine, you can leave open buckets of water out for 24-48 hours. If you run a fast airstone or a pump in the bucket it speeds up outgassing considerably but it will still take at least 24 hours and likely at least 48 hours if there’s no circulation.
For chloramines, I don’t have as exact a timing but in my own experience, five days with circulation is sufficient for 5 gallon buckets.
Incidentally, the size & shape of the container the aging water is in can have quite an effect on how fast outgassing happens.
The shallower the water is, the faster the outgassing will be.
The greater the surface area is, the faster outgassing will be and the reverse is also true. Use a very narrow container and it will take substantially longer so If you’re aging water in bottles or jugs it will take much longer than in a bucket or tub.
If you have dip strips with a chlorine test pad, for pools or aquariums, they can be used to verify that the chlorine or chloramine is gone.
So if you find yourself needing a way to dechlorinate without a water conditioner, I hope this will be useful.
Reference -
Chloramines and Pool Operation
Are you stuck with having to buy water in bottles? No, thankfully, you aren’t, whether you ran out of conditioner or are just trying to save a few bucks, there are options.
With certain medications it may be necessary to avoid the use of any reducing agent, but substances that ‘remove’ chlorine are all reducing agents so far as I understand how they work, so what are the options in that case?
I have done a fair bit of in depth research into this topic and there certainly are some options, though most of them require time & some effort plus preplanning.
Alternative chemicals
Should you happen to have vitamin C handy, either in the form of ascorbic acid or sodium ascorbate, it will quickly reduce chlorine in water. You may only think of it as a vitamin but it is a chemical and one you might actually have around.
The dosage is 40mg per gallon for chlorine and a little more if it’s chloramine. The extra for chloramine may not be strictly necessary but since I could find no data to support either the same dose as for chlorine or extra, a little extra seems wise if only out of an abundance of caution. Vit C reduces chlorine virtually instantaneously and the amount used poses no known risks to livestock and is soon gone anyway.
As an example, for fifty gallons, you’d need 2 grams of Vit C (thoroughly dissolved) for chlorine or 2.5 - 3 grams for chloramine. I did not try to figure out how cost effective it may be compared to water conditioner but it’s easy enough - just figure out how many doses there are in a container (per gallon) for both the Vit C and your conditioner and see how much a dose costs for each.
Ideally your Vitamin C will be in powder form but if not, fear not. Tablets can be crushed. Capsules can be opened and have powder inside. Ascorbic acid is mildly acidic and might have a minor effect on pH if you have very low KH. Sodium ascorbate is a buffered form of Vitamin C and should not affect pH so it may be the preferable form for some. .
Non reducing dechlorination methods pretty much all take time.
Fresh carbon
If you have fresh carbon, you can very easily filter out chlorine simply by running the water through the carbon as you fill a bucket. This one is pretty quick and easy - if need be put the carbon in a clean kitchen sieve and just run tap water through it.
This is the only non chemical method that’s reasonably quick.
Unfortunately, it simply does not work with chloramine. For carbon to adsorb chloramines it has to be a very specially processed version of carbon, known as catalytic carbon.
Catalytic carbon is costly & quite difficult to source and is definitely not something you could get at a LFS or hardware or big box joint.
Boiling water
This will remove chlorine and chloramine but it takes a loooooooooong time - no less than 20 minutes at a full rolling boil for chlorine and substantially longer than that for chloramine - at least 90 minutes or longer. So if you need more than a few gallons, it would take ages and ages plus use up a lot of energy.
If you try it, you need to keep the pot covered or evaporation will make you crazy as you’ll find you need to keep topping up & then restarting the timing all over again.
But it does work.
It also softens hard water because it changes calcium bicarbonates into insoluble calcium carbonate ( that delightful yuck known as scale when it accumulates in a kettle or coffee maker). Depending on what species you keep, this might pose a problem.
Aging water or Natural outgassing
Any keeper of a certain age or greater surely must remember leaving their water out to ‘age’ as we called it, to let chlorine leave the water of its own volition.
Chlorine is volatile so it wants to be a gas - so it outgasses from water relatively quickly. This property is what led water treatment companies to switch to the use of chloramines instead, as they are a little less volatile and thus remain in the water for a longer period of time.
There are a surprising number of folks out there that seem to think chloramine cannot outgas, but this is simply not true. It just takes longer than it does for chlorine.
In fact, what you smell from a swimming pool isn’t chlorine gas, which seems to be what most assume it must be.
But it’s actually chloramine gas, not chlorine and it is produced by the reaction between the chlorine in the pool water & bacteria & other organics it comes into contact with.
Chloramine gas may not be quite as dangerous as chlorine gas is, but it’s very irritating and people such as lifeguards and others who have prolonged exposure to it can become very sensitized to it.
So aging water works no matter if it’s for chlorine or chloramines but the time needed differs.
For chlorine, you can leave open buckets of water out for 24-48 hours. If you run a fast airstone or a pump in the bucket it speeds up outgassing considerably but it will still take at least 24 hours and likely at least 48 hours if there’s no circulation.
For chloramines, I don’t have as exact a timing but in my own experience, five days with circulation is sufficient for 5 gallon buckets.
Incidentally, the size & shape of the container the aging water is in can have quite an effect on how fast outgassing happens.
The shallower the water is, the faster the outgassing will be.
The greater the surface area is, the faster outgassing will be and the reverse is also true. Use a very narrow container and it will take substantially longer so If you’re aging water in bottles or jugs it will take much longer than in a bucket or tub.
If you have dip strips with a chlorine test pad, for pools or aquariums, they can be used to verify that the chlorine or chloramine is gone.
So if you find yourself needing a way to dechlorinate without a water conditioner, I hope this will be useful.
Reference -
Chloramines and Pool Operation
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