Homemade Prime using Safe

 

A lot of people in the aquarium hobby need to use a decent dechlorinater because most of us hobbyists are using municipal water (city water) and the city tends to add chemicals like chlorine and chloramine to the water to make it safe for humans and animals to drink or use, so we need a dechlorinator for our aquarium hobby to make the water we use safe for the aquatic animals we keep to live in.

Throughout the years of me keeping fish, I have noticed a huge trend of liquid dechlorinators and their massive price tag that almost makes me reconsider the hobby all together. Luckily over the years, I have stopped buying premade liquid dechlorinators and searched for dry, powder dechlorintors, and my favorite has to be Seachem's Safe.

Seachem's Safe powder dechlorinator has the distinctive smell, and you are able to buy it in very large quantities to stretch your hobby dollar.

Isn't Prime different then Safe?

The short answer to this question is; Not really. They essentially do the same thing. Both Prime and Safe removed chlorine, chloramine, and ammonia, and they both detoxify nitrite and nitrate -- they just simply come in different forms. Now, Safe is more marketed towards hobbyists with larger volume enclosures like ponds are large aquaponics systems, whereas Prime is marketed more towards the typical aquarium hobbyists that have smaller/typical enclosures for their aquatic life. Prime is easier to dose in smaller systems, and Safe is easier to dose for things like ponds. Simply using 1/4 of a teaspoon of the Safe powder will dechlorinate 300 gallons of water! Crazy, right? Luckily I came up with a hack that allows you to still buy Seachem's Safe and use it on your smaller systems so you too can stretch your hobby dollar.

You will need:

• A small digital scale.
• Seachem Safe.
• Purified water.

Weigh out 20-25 grams of Safe (I do 50 grams of Safe powder to 1000mL of purified water) and 500mL of purified water, and mix the two together well, and Ta-da! Homemade Prime using Safe. 1mL of mixture dechlorinates 10 gallons of water. You can easily add this mixture to a bottle with a 1mL pump to make dechlorinating water a breeze!

Disclaimer:

Seachem does not recommend this because there aren't any "stabilizers in Safe like Prime to keep it stable in liquid form", but over the years I have never had a single issue. Seachem does say you can do this in small quantities, but the mixture should be thrown out after 24 hours -- and honestly, I think they just don't want to lose money selling Prime. If everyone started using this hack with Safe, and stopped buying Prime, they would definitely be lose money as Safe is not bought anywhere near as much as Prime is because prime is pre-mixed, and used relatively quickly in contrast.

Optional Scaling:

• 10 grams of Safe to 250mL of purified water.
• 20 grams of Safe to 500mL of purified water.
• 30 grams of Safe to 750mL of purified water.
• 40 grams of Safe to 1000mL of purified water.
• etc...

You can also double the amounts of Safe powder per millilitres of water to double the potency of your dechlorinator mixture for larger volumes of water. For example, rather then adding 10 grams of Safe powder to 250mL of water (where you can dechlorinate 10 gallons of water per 1mL), you can double the amount to 20 grams of Safe powder to 250mL of water and be able to treat 20 gallons per 1mL of Safe-water mixture.

Alternatively, you can add the powder directly to your tank instead:

• 1/16th teaspoon of Safe powder to 75 gallons of water.
• 1/8th teaspoon of Safe powder to 150 gallons of water.
• 1/4th teaspoon of Safe powder to 300 gallons of water.
• etc...

Anyway, I hope you found this tip helpful because I certainly do. I have been using this hack for the last 3 years and it saves a lot of time during larger water changes. No pipettes, no measuring cups, or spoons, just spray and go. Cheers!