Benefits: promotes healthy gill function and eliminates fish stress caused by ammonia. Each dose of Ammo-lock will detoxify 3.0 ppm if ammonia, 7.0 ppm of chlorine and 5.0 ppm of chloramines.

Directions: add 5 ml for 10 US gallon of water. Continue to add every 2 days until ammonia is not detected. If, after 7 days, ammonia is still present, perform a partial water change, service your biological filter and reduce feeding.

Tip: Ammo-lock does not remove ammonia; it converts it to a non-toxic form. After use, your aquarium water will still test positive for ammonia even though it is in a non-toxic form which will be removed by the biological filter.

Sometimes it seems crazy to add tap water if it has a little ammonia in it and that has troubled me. But let's say that three units of ammonia (not having the developer's statistics with me, these are made up numbers of convenience) are added to the tank with the water change. But the fish have also been excreting ammonia and the bacteria that break down the ammonia into nitrites are active, so there is little other ammonia in the water, but there are four or five units of nitrites. Another group of beneficial bacteria is also breaking down the nitrites into nitrates.

It might help to have a visual of this process. If one would like that, go to Google, click on image search and search for Aquarium nitrogen cycle.

Now the fish can tolerate a lot more nitrate in the water than the earlier waste products, but there comes a time when too many nitrates can cause problems. These include things like stunting of growth, lowered immunity, disease outbreaks, eventually a slowing down, even suffocating (since the nitrates can eventually block the ability of the blood to carry oxygen) and dying by nitrate poisoning. So we do water changes.

Now let's say that in doing a water change, we take out 10 units of nitrates. That seems a little goofy in that we added three units of ammonia, but we are at least ahead of where we were. I'm sure there are days when we do what we have to do on the job, as home makers, as home owners, as students and so on, We get several tasks done and discover that other responsibilities have also cropped up.

However keeping up the water changes beats watching the fish respond to the increasingly toxic levels of nitrates by doing things like slowing down, clamping their fins, shimmying, sitting on the tank bottom, losing some color intensity or even turning black in places (a sure sign of stress) or become vulnerable to bacterial infections where fins rot, blood is visible under the skin or lesions and sores develop on their sides. A lot of those last things are because the potentially harmful critters in the water, who normally are kept at bay by the fish's immune system, can more successfully attack the fish as the immune system is "inhibited" or "compromised" or "slowed down" by the increasing quantity of harmful stuff in the water.

Water changing is the thing I like the least about the aquarium hobby. (Was on-line yesterday discussing almost automatic water changing systems with a gentleman. There is a fair amount of work and money in setting up things like that. Sometimes one might even have to sell their house and move to a place where such a system can be set up.) I also don't always like taking the car in for fluid changes or painting and re-roofing the house or leaving the toilet seat always down - the real biggie here. ;) But I like having available transportation, a snug, reasonably attractive home and getting along with family members, so I try my best and do those things. :)