Thread: Metal Removing Resin

In my never ending quest for good water quality

I'd been looking at using something i'd seen before, but decided to go with bonechar instead.
but having seen such good improvements after adding metal chleating dechlorinator to the pond,
i've decided to go for a two pronged approach to metal removal from the tap.

from what i've read bonechar does a good job of removing metal ions has a high physical capacity, but need a long contact time to be effective and doesn't remove 100% of all metals.
metal removing resin works faster with smaller volumes and has a reasonable capacity, but not as high as bonechar.

so i've added a metal removing stage to my tapwater filtering, and just converted a 10" 3 pod i wasn't using with 3 empty spent GAC cartridges i'd saved.
together they can hold 2.1 litres of resin so i'll see if they have any positive impact on the fish like i've found with the other things i've done.
as laboratory testing water for a lot of different metals, is expensive and if you do manage to figure out what high levels, of what metals you have.
do you then have to pay north of £150 a month to check that they are still being removed?

if it has a noticeable effect i'll probably increase the stage to a resin vessel and use more,
but even if the effect is limited i'd at least stick with the small 3 stage i have.

the only downsides to using resin is it's main purpose is to remove alkalinity from tap water, the selectivity for metals removal is the secondary purpose.
so you need to be mindful that your KH and pH may be effected depending on how much you use.
and while it is loading up on carbonate ions which it swaps for metal ions, it leaves CO2 from the carbonates in the water which also need to be gassed off.

though i found when testing from new it lowered the KH from 7 out of the tap, to a KH of 4 at 240ml/min
https://ro-man.com/product/koi-boy-p...ration-system/

Ok so that went spectacularly wrong...
to anyone thinking of using this stuff i wouldn't recommend it...the fish didn't like it at all...

They started flashing after a couple of days or so,
so much so the Shiro Utsuri broke the leading ray of her dorsal fin,
so i had to anesthetise her, cut the broken tip away, and treat the damaged area.

I took the metal resin filter out, and the fish were absolutely fine the next day....

Originally Posted by Whitey79

Dave sorry to here about your shiro damaging it's self

Lucky enough you knew what the problem was and iradicated the issue before more damage was done

may be i just had a bad experience with this stuff and others haven't... even though it is being sold as a koi pond water purifying product.

Sorry about the shiro hopefully it heals ok, I’ve used the resins before with sensitive tropical fish and never had any problems although there are a lot of different resins about at the moment, I’m sure they are not all the same. Most were originally used for drinking water , I take it the resin you used was an ion exchange resin ? Did you recharge it before use ? The ion resins do give off salt when pulling metals etc out of the water supply, maybe it hadn’t been recharged with a pure salt ?

Originally Posted by funkrat

Sorry about the shiro hopefully it heals ok, I’ve used the resins before with sensitive tropical fish and never had any problems although there are a lot of different resins about at the moment, I’m sure they are not all the same. Most were originally used for drinking water , I take it the resin you used was an ion exchange resin ? Did you recharge it before use ? The ion resins do give off salt when pulling metals etc out of the water supply, maybe it hadn’t been recharged with a pure salt ?

it's not an ion exchange resin,
so doesn't release chlorides or salt.
only carbonates in preference to metal ions after becoming saturated with carbonates from the water.

so just adsorbs carbonates, similar to the way a DI resin works i assume.

Originally Posted by funkrat

Sorry I misunderstood and thought it was an ion exchange resin, ( I don’t think a lot of the retailers actually have any experience or real knowledge of what a lot of these resin are actually like they have just jumped on the bandwagon as they have become very popular over the last few years ) it’s a real shame that it is releasing something or altering the water source to something that your koi don’t like :-(
The only thing I could suggest is to try speaking to someone like https://www.resin-products.com/ who are an American company who manufactures a lot of aquarium resin products on the market and see if they have anything that could do the job. Although with what’s happened I understand not wanting to risk it again.

i was just trying it out as the last two changes i made, by adding a big blue of bone char,
and using a 3 channel dosing pump to dose API tap water dechlorinator made an immediate positive noticable improvement.
if i didn't see an improvement with the resin i wasn't going to bother continuing with it.

i had thought about getting my tap water tested, but the source changes quite frequently sometimes nitrates are 0ppm other times over 20ppm.
so i would need to get it tested frequently, and keep getting it tested to know when metals ect were not being removed,
at £150 a go

so decided that visual observation of the fish and deduction was the best method in practise.
if they start acting moody, test for chlorine, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate ect... and do a couple of scrapes, if nothing is found.
then change bone char or increase dechlorinator dosage, and watch for improvement.