Does Prime actually "Detoxify" free ammonia, NH3?

[taricha]

Adding a second container of water into it makes the geometry and even convection currents inside the overall container due to small temperature differences of great importance, unless you run the experiment for times long enough to know you are at equilibrium.

right, and it might take a really long time to be sure you equalize NH3 concentration between water volumes with a few ppm total ammonia by simple diffusion through air.

 

[Dan_P]

Here's proof of concept. I really like the simplicity of this demonstration to explain what we mean when we say the NH3 is still there and it's still a gas.

I took tank water and added ammonia drops to ~4ppm.
One part was untreated, one part I added 4x dose Prime and mixed. Then I poured the mixed 40mL into 50mL tubes, covered the tops with a paper towel, put a couple of seachem NH3 films on the paper towel and covered the whole thing in parafilm. The water never touched the paper towel, the NH3 films are simply responding to the gases over the water.

Top pic is after 1-2 hours. Bottom pic is overnight.

Left to right Tubes: Control - no ammonia, Ammonia untreated, Ammonia + 4x Prime, (and as bonus the rightmost is with ClorAm-X)

I did this because it was faster than waiting for NH3 to diffuse out of one sample of water and into another. But this strongly suggests that's exactly what would happen, whether you do or don't treat with Prime (or likely other products).

Very clever. My hats off to you.

 

[Dan_P]

a couple of simple-ish physical things I've checked to see if it removes total ammonia...
1) boiling in a distiller - clears essentially all ammonia in the first small fraction (100mL out of a gallon) to distill out.
2) placing in a vacuum chamber - a few minutes in a (not great) vacuum chamber that boiled off enough water to drop the temp a few degrees (felt slightly cooler) removed almost no ammonia.

I have observed bubbling air through an ammonium chloride solution in Instant Ocean overnight lose a few tenths of a ppm total ammonia. @taricha put me onto to this.

 

[taricha]

Here's another look at what Prime does to affect the detection of gas-phase NH3 in the air above saltwater with ammonia added. The water sample sits about two inches below the top. Coffee filter was placed over the top, two tiny NH3 sensing film disks placed on each and plastic kitchen wrap over the top, secured with a rubber band. Was left on a shelf in a closet for 24hr.

To address Randy's point about the need for comparison standards....

This is a very good experiment, but it is lacking in a dose dependent control. For example, if the Prime or Chlor-Am-X reduced the free ammonia by 90%, would the response of the badge be the same?

One way to deal with this issue is to have controls of 4, 2, 0.5, 0.25 and 0.1 ppm ammonia (or some similar progression) and see what happens to the badges.

....for comparison standards, bottles have 0ppm, 0.67ppm, 1.3ppm and 2ppm total ammonia added (so zero, 1/3, 2/3, and full 2ppm) And two other bottles contain 2ppm ammonia treated with Prime - and the last one got treated with ChlorAm-X as a bonus.

There's considerable variation in the disk color, so it's hard to be precise but the sample with Prime looks to have a color closest to the two highest levels - corresponding to a reduction somewhere around none to 1/3. (and ChlorAm-X looks not any better).

To try to squeeze out whatever any extra quantification there is available in the pic, I looked at the photo with Color Grab app and plotted the "K" parameter of the CMYK color scale.

The black represents the standards for comparison. Red Stars are the samples with Prime, (and green x's are ClorAm-X.) There's plenty of uncertainty in trying to quantify with these cheap disks, but the uncertainty in this data is consistent with a reduction of NH3 gas above the water of anywhere from < 1/3 to nothing.

 

[Dan_P]

Here's another look at what Prime does to affect the detection of gas-phase NH3 in the air above saltwater with ammonia added. The water sample sits about two inches below the top. Coffee filter was placed over the top, two tiny NH3 sensing film disks placed on each and plastic kitchen wrap over the top, secured with a rubber band. Was left on a shelf in a closet for 24hr.

To address Randy's point about the need for comparison standards....


....for comparison standards, bottles have 0ppm, 0.67ppm, 1.3ppm and 2ppm total ammonia added (so zero, 1/3, 2/3, and full 2ppm) And two other bottles contain 2ppm ammonia treated with Prime - and the last one got treated with ChlorAm-X as a bonus.

There's considerable variation in the disk color, so it's hard to be precise but the sample with Prime looks to have a color closest to the two highest levels - corresponding to a reduction somewhere around none to 1/3. (and ChlorAm-X looks not any better).

To try to squeeze out whatever any extra quantification there is available in the pic, I looked at the photo with Color Grab app and plotted the "K" parameter of the CMYK color scale.

The black represents the standards for comparison. Red Stars are the samples with Prime, (and green x's are ClorAm-X.) There's plenty of uncertainty in trying to quantify with these cheap disks, but the uncertainty in this data is consistent with a reduction of NH3 gas above the water of anywhere from < 1/3 to nothing.

The Seachem Ammonia Alert badge might perform better but they would make your experiment costlier.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Good experiment now, and I’m now confident to conclude, and state to others, that “Seachem Prime shows little to no effect on ammonia in appropriate experiments”.

 

[Dan_P]

Good experiment now, and I’m now confident to conclude, and state to others, that “Seachem Prime shows little to no effect on ammonia in appropriate experiments”.

ClorAmX under similar experiments also fails to show ammonia reduction.

I begin to wonder whether all products in this class claiming to remove ammonia from solution do not. And yes, I would not be surprised to find that scientist claiming otherwise are incorrect.

 

[Phang]

Very late to this discussion and not much to add, except I've dealt with Seachem for almost 20 years. In that time I've only ever been told that Prime detoxifies Ammonia, NO3, NO2 etc which will NOT show on any test kit immediately, i.e. it's converted to something that still shows on test kits, but is apparently non toxic form. Ammoniashould however then be removed from the system quicker than if Prime wasn't dosed, maybe that's something someone can test?

I have NO idea if this is true, however, is it possible that with all the great minds in this group that maybe Seachem do know something that everyone here doesn't? Maybe they discovered a way to convert Ammonia, or bind it, in a way that nobody here knows? They've been incredibly guarded about this product, way more than any other over the years, IMO nobody would dare make it public the ingredients of it for fear of being sued into oblivion. But, that's just my opinion based on years of dealing with them, certainly not fact.

Regarding personal experience of experimenting with Prime - I had a customer buying too much Prime a long time ago and I asked him what on earth he was doing with it all, and he said he was dosing it every 48 hours into his system, and running his nitrates at several hundred ppm, all without any problems. I visited this tank, and whilst it wasn't the world's greatest aquarium, he was indeed feeding MASSIVELY into this system; running antiquated filtration; and definitely suffering from very high nitrite and nitrate. Yet the aquarium showed no signs at all of any issues! So it would seem that Prime really was detoxifying those two, what effect it had on Ammonia at that time, neither of us questioned sadly.

 

[Reefahholic]

These companies will tell you anything to get your money.

 

[Malcontent]

Nitrate isn't particularly toxic. An 8-month study with salmon at 44 and 440 ppm found no differences in mortality, growth rate, fin score, blood work, etc.

Nitrite is "detoxified" by chloride and without measuring that or having a control group you can't conclude Prime had any role.

Prime "works" by detoxifying things that weren't at toxic levels to begin with--ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and heavy metals.

Seachem likely closely guards their products' ingredients not because they fear their competitors would copy them but because they're mundane and if known people would realize they couldn't do what they claimed.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

Very late to this discussion and not much to add, except I've dealt with Seachem for almost 20 years. In that time I've only ever been told that Prime detoxifies Ammonia, NO3, NO2 etc which will NOT show on any test kit immediately, i.e. it's converted to something that still shows on test kits, but is apparently non toxic form. Ammoniashould however then be removed from the system quicker than if Prime wasn't dosed, maybe that's something someone can test?

I have NO idea if this is true, however, is it possible that with all the great minds in this group that maybe Seachem do know something that everyone here doesn't?

You either did not read the thread, or misunderstood it. We know full well what Seahem claims, and demonstrated that things they do actually claim are untrue.

I’d also add that some of us are expert chemists. This thread is not just a bunch of speculation. It involves well controlled and understood chemical experiments.

Seachem, on the other hand does not provide ANY reason to believe the product works as claimed . NONE. They also make other demonstrably false claims about other products, and should not, IMO, be viewed as a reliable source of chemical information.

Your assertions show the problems in assessing utility. Your friend likely didn’t have nitrate as high as expected because nitrite interferes with nitrate testing and will cause very high and inaccurate readings for nitrate. Neither nitrite nor nitrate are particularly toxic, so adding prime likely accomplished nothing useful. There are are just not enough molecules of any type in Prime to detoxify hundreds of ppm of nitrate, even if there was some magic chemistry that only Seachem knows.

 

[taricha]

Ammoniashould however then be removed from the system quicker than if Prime wasn't dosed, maybe that's something someone can test?

This was actually checked in post 212
It turns out that Prime does not slow down or speed up nitrification. The bacteria process ammonia to NO2 and NO2 to NO3 as though there was never any change to ammonia or NO2.
The final amounts of NO3 and the rates of the nitrification steps were identical...

left Chart is ammonia testing with API total ammonia. Right chart is Nitrite. Green dashed lines are when Prime was added.

here's the final NO3 values....

The sample with no sand cycled nothing, and the two samples with sand produced the same amount of NO3 regardless of Prime or not.

So to recap - with or without multiple big doses of Prime, nitrifiers in the sand cycled ammonia to NO2 and finally NO3. They began producing NO2 at the same time, they hit peak NO2 at the same time, they processed away NO2 at the same time, and they generate the same final NO3 values, whether there were Prime doses or not.

is it possible that with all the great minds in this group that maybe Seachem do know something that everyone here doesn't? Maybe they discovered a way to convert Ammonia, or bind it, in a way that nobody here knows?

I'm not a chemist, but if I developed a product that did some sought-after chemical mechanism, I would expend a great deal of effort coming up with a way to verify that it did what I wanted. In fact, how the heck would I know I even had a product at all without some verification mechanism?
Yet, there is seemingly no mechanism to demonstrate that Prime does what it claims. In fact, Seachem asserts that their NH3 sensing film disks can verify Prime working - but this is repeatably demonstrably wrong. So no - for this reason as well as the other reasons Randy lists, Seachem has no credibility on the functioning of this product.

 

[Dan_P]

I have NO idea if this is true, however, is it possible that with all the great minds in this group that maybe Seachem do know something that everyone here doesn't? Maybe they discovered a way to convert Ammonia, or bind it, in a way that nobody here knows? They've been incredibly guarded about this product, way more than any other over the years, IMO nobody would dare make it public the ingredients of it for fear of being sued into oblivion. But, that's just my opinion based on years of dealing with them, certainly not fact.

Seachem was caught in a lie concerning claims of two products, which @taricha mentioned, but is worth reiterating.

The Seachem Ammonia Alert badge is suppose to detect NH3. If Prime removes NH3 or Nh4+ from solution the badge should detect the removal. It detects no change. Which product does not work? Seachem even states that the badge will show that Prime is working. Oops, right?

Several of us have tested the badge and they do a good job detecting NH3. The only conclusion seems to be that Prime does not affect ammonia concentration. I will take the controversy one step further and say no soluble product on the market is capable of reducing ammonia concentration. For example, another big name ClorAmX fails to reduce ammonia concentration.

An alternative explanation to yours is that if you are selling snake oil, you keep very, very quiet about the ingredients in your product.

 

[pal98111]

This started when @Dan_P was looking at measuring NH3 with seneye and was curious about performance near zero NH3. I suggested trying Prime to artificially zero out the NH3 sensor, and the results were weird... so I checked with my seachem kit.

Prime by Seachem is commonly used to treat tap water, it dechlorinates Chlorine and Chloramine. This effect is strong and easily measurable by test kits.

But Prime also claims that it "...detoxifies ammonia. Prime® converts ammonia into a safe, non-toxic form that is readily removed by the tank’s biofilter." They say that the normal dose of Prime can detoxify 1ppm ammonia.

NH3 is the toxic form of ammonia, which under normal tank conditions is a tiny part of the total ammonia (Randy's Article for details). Most chemical kits measure total ammonia - NH3+NH4, and so seachem says that these kits can't detect the effect of Prime to detoxify NH3. And one should instead use a test method that measures only free ammonia - NH3 instead, according to Seachem - such as their kit.
"However, the best solution ;-) is to use our MultiTest™ Ammonia kit; it uses a gas exchange sensor system which is not affected by the presence of Prime® or other similar products. It also has the added advantage that it can detect the more dangerous free ammonia and distinguish it from total ammonia (total ammonia is both free ammonia and non-toxic ionized forms of ammonia)."

So here we go.

I pulled a liter of tank water, spiked it with ammonia to ~1ppm total ammonia.

API at 5 min confirms it's in the ballpark of 0.5-1ppm total ammonia.


Then I dosed a drop of Prime from two separate bottles (one new unopened) into the 1L of water. Approximately a double dose from each for a cumulative 4x dose of Prime and stirred.

After 30 minutes, I then used the ammonia sensing films from the seachem kit to see if the measured free ammonia, NH3 was decreased by the "detoxifying" effect of Prime.
The ammonia sensing discs are supposed to be read at 15 or 30 minutes to determine free ammonia.

Each beaker has ~75mL of sample water.
Bottom left is tank water only - clean zero
Two in the middle top and bottom are replicates of tank water +1ppm total ammonia - disks form a color as they should, approximately consistent with 1ppm total ammonia at ~8.0pH (maybe around 0.05 on the top 30 minute scale of the color card)
Top right beaker is tank water +1ppm total ammonia +4x dose of Prime - the disk forms exactly the same color as the samples that were not treated with Prime. The same amount of NH3 is apparently present.

So according to Seachem's free ammonia kit, Seachem Prime does not do anything to decrease toxic free ammonia, NH3. If it has any effect, it's gone within 30 minutes.

(BTW, when I overdose prime to 30x recommended dose, it still didn't decrease the NH3 measured.)

Maybe Prime worked better for @Dan_P measuring with the Seneye NH3 sensing device???

Update: see Dan's measured zero effect from Prime with two more ammonia detecting kits in post number 16

Update: Amphipods seem to fare equally poorly when exposed to NH3, whether treated with Prime or not. post number 44

I've been using Fritz Ammonia Remover. After I use it, my ammonia test goes from green to yellow so I'm happy with the result. Why didn't you retest the ammonia content using the yellow-green test that you used when you dosed the ammonia in your sample? It is certainly doing something when the test changes color.

 

[taricha]

I've been using Fritz Ammonia Remover. After I use it, my ammonia test goes from green to yellow so I'm happy with the result. Why didn't you retest the ammonia content using the yellow-green test that you used when you dosed the ammonia in your sample? It is certainly doing something when the test changes color.

I actually looked at how Prime interferes with this test a few times. Here's post 13, post 113, and post 165.
"It is certainly doing something" - but not to ammonia - to the ammonia test....
All ammonia "removers" are dechlorinators / reducing agents, and one of the principle reagents in the chemical ammonia tests that go from yellow to green is chlorine.
Below is documentation from Hach about how these total ammonia tests work and any dechlorinator (even just thiosulfate) will appear to lower the ammonia on one of these tests.

For the salycilate ammonia test method to work, you have chlorine combine with the ammonia to form monochloramine. From Hach documentation...

.....
see below from another hach ammonia test documentation

 

[Dan_P]

I actually looked at how Prime interferes with this test a few times. Here's post 13, post 113, and post 165.
"It is certainly doing something" - but not to ammonia - to the ammonia test....
All ammonia "removers" are dechlorinators / reducing agents, and one of the principle reagents in the chemical ammonia tests that go from yellow to green is chlorine.
Below is documentation from Hach about how these total ammonia tests work and any dechlorinator (even just thiosulfate) will appear to lower the ammonia on one of these tests.

I have to wonder how much of a role the salicylate test played in starting or maintaining the myth that Prime and other soluble ammonia mitigators reduce ammonia concentration.

 

[taricha]

I have to wonder how much of a role the salicylate test played in starting or maintaining the myth that Prime and other soluble ammonia mitigators reduce ammonia concentration.

To illustrate your point, a quick google scholar on hydroxymethanesulfonate ammonia aquaculture gets a few pages of results and in every single one of them that I can see the methodology used, the salicylate total ammonia test was the only test method to determine that ammonia was lowered.
So in the aquaculture world, I'd say it's a big effect.

 

[taricha]

This paper is a wild ride.
They tested saltwater fish in shipping bags with Prime, Nitrifiers, (in a later round, Ion exchange resin) and Nothing (control).
The amount of total ammonia ramped up to 8ppm over 3 days.
The only fish loss was in the bags where they added enough Prime that their total ammonia test showed 90% ammonia reduction. It was a lot of Prime (0.5%).

One Banggai died, and the second was about to die when they ended that treatment. (The fish in the control that had no treatment and just ran up to 8ppm total ammonia were ok.)

Then they re-did it with Chromis, cut back the amount of Prime (don't say how much) to "minimize the chemical toxicity on fish" and all fish ended up ok.
Even the ones in the control that just had ammonia run up to 8ppm without intervention. The ion exchange resin did nothing to lower ammonia, but it kept the pH at 8.0 while the other treatments with fish in the bags dropped to 7.4, but even the higher pH and the ramp up to 8ppm total ammonia did not kill the fish over that 72 hour time frame.

The authors still concluded that Prime was useful anyway, lol.

Bonus, the nitrifiers that were helpful were some One and Only that Dr. Tim sent the authors, but those were only helpful after they pre-cultured them on ammonia for 18 days. Also they only cut the total ammonia in half. Shoulda gone with Biospira or Fritz.
double-bonus, they sequenced what they cultured up from One and Only, and it was a bunch of Ammonia oxidizing Archaea!

 

[Dan_P]

To illustrate your point, a quick google scholar on hydroxymethanesulfonate ammonia aquaculture gets a few pages of results and in every single one of them that I can see the methodology used, the salicylate total ammonia test was the only test method to determine that ammonia was lowered.
So in the aquaculture world, I'd say it's a big effect.

Fastest Googler in the West! Houston, we have correlation.

 

[Randy Holmes-Farley]

IMO, it is evident that a great many people claim success with Prime because they just do not know how much ammonia would have been needed to cause a problem.