Copper in your Water?
by Bart van Dijk
Edited version of an article first published in The Fishmonger, Vancouver Aquatic
Hobbyist Club, September 2002
Aquarticles
My first birthday in our new house...my wife went all out to make it a
special evening. We had only been married six months and were expecting our first child.
The nausea which my wife was experiencing was coming under control. A great and happy
time!
All our parents, brothers and sisters, ten couples in total, knew that my wife had
allowed me to buy our first aquarium. This aquarium was duly set up and allowed to sit for
a week with just a lot of plants as part of the cycling process.
Want to guess what I got for my birthday?... Each of the couples in our family
showed up with a bag of fish. All the bags were duly floated on top of the aquarium for
about an hour, and all were ceremoniously released at the same time - kind of like a
christening party for my future fish keeping. The fish all disappeared into the plants,
but throughout the evening they showed up one by one, floating dead or dying on the
surface. Appropriately, by the time the last guest left the last fish had died. Guess
where the aquarium was? - yes, right in the point of focus of the living room.
During the next week the water was taken out of the tank and replaced with different
tap water, from my Dad's house in Vancouver. A couple of guppies were introduced and they
lived happily ever after. And as long as we carted all our water from my Dad's house there
was no more problem with fish dying en masse.
During the last few months I have been selling fish to some pet stores....
I make absolutely sure that as far as I can tell they are healthy and good looking, but
still I feel kind of responsible and I simply have to go to the stores to check on
"my" fish. A few times I have asked store keepers to check the pH and hardness
when fish looked uncomfortable, and then when the fish were moved to another aquarium on a
different filtration line the problems usually disappeared. I was getting a bit blasé
about this and did not go and check on a batch in a certain store.... finally got there a
week later, looked in all tanks - none of my fish - makes you feel good all your fish sold
within a week.... talked with the fish manager who graciously said "I don't know what
we did but they all died."
At one of our club meetings Lee Newman showed us a lot of slides of his
newly set up fishroom.... and we were all surprised to see huge containers
of several hundred gallons of plain water being conditioned for his fish tanks. We asked
him about this, thinking that this was a huge waste of fish space, and he told us that
even so he still had a lot of problems. He had had his water chemically analysed and found
copper in lethal quantities to fish. So he installed a heavy metal absorption system
in front of his holding tanks and was able to keep fish successfully.
***
You might say "If copper in the water is that bad, why on earth do they let it get
in, in the first place?" The natural water in our catchment area does not have any
copper, or none to speak of. Neither is any added in the treatment plants. All the
main distribution pipes are steel, asbestos-cement or cast iron, and you will not find any
copper in the system that holds water for a long time (and as we know from previous talks
water can be in the mains for about six months to a year). The only place copper is used
is to get from the main in front of your house to your house and the lines inside your
house. But luckily the water is in these pipes for only a short time, and you and everyone
in your house can readily reduce the amount that is absorbed from your pipes by being
fully aware of the problem.
Yes, you already begin to see the solution - limit the time
the water you want to use is in your pipes. So run that tap till the water is fresh
and no more problems. But of course there is always a but - the bugbear is your hot water
tank, which gets filled from the water in the supply line to your house whenever hot water
is used.
It takes a lot of discipline for sure, but lots of people have had to do it on a
regular basis through the ages. In Holland where I was born in the 1930's all the house
pipes were made of lead, and every Dutch kid knew how the Roman Empire came to its end -
lead poisoning of course, Emperor Nero being the prime example. So if you were the first
one awake it was your job to flush the absorbed lead out of the house lines without fail,
or all of you were sure to go mad! For our house the waterline from the centre of the
street to our property line was 33 feet; property line to the house 55 feet; to the hot
water tank 12 feet - for a total of 100 feet of 3/4 inch line. Hence the volume was 530
cubic inches. Now dividing by 1728 made that about .31 cubic feet, and multiplying by 62
made that 20 lbs of water. Divide by 10 = 2 gallons. The toilet furthest away from the
point of entry used 3 gallons per fill, so the routine was simple: first thing in the
morning, flush away all the water out of the copper lines. Flush that toilet, but make
sure not to open any (especially hot water) taps until the toilet reservoir has stopped
filling. When we had been away most of the day, flushing that toilet and waiting for the
refill was good also. There was also nothing wrong with running a couple of gallons of
cold water through our shower or bath before opening the hot water tap. Incidentally this
also got rid of the lead dissolved from the solder used to put our pipes together, and for
the same reason we dumped all the stale water from our soldered kettle before making a
fresh brew, as part of our normal routine
When I first connected all those fish dying to an excess of copper, it made me really
fearful about the implications for our unborn baby and my pregnant wife. It was explained
to me that the main difference was that fish are extremely sensitive due to absorption
through their gills directly into their bloodstream, but the quantities which affect us
are very very much higher. Nevertheless, it is good to be aware of the metals. This was
recently illustrated to us by news of mercury poisoning in Japan, where the mercury was
absorbed by eating food fish which were caught in mercury laden water. And don't forget
the rumblings we hear about aluminium pans and Alzheimer's disease - also absorbed via the
food we eat.
....So watching out for the health of your fish might also be beneficial to you and
your family.
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