1 Part Per Million

 Dealing with customers who like to do 'technical' speak is always 'fun' because half the time you have no idea what they're talking about.

The most popular sort of techno speak is when customers ask for Elodia or Koridorous. Which the former is known as Anacharis in the store and the latter are just our Cory Catfish.

But customers often insist on speaking more sciency when they're wanting those particular things.

It's more amusing though when the customer tries to sound smart but obviously doesn't know what they're talking about.

I had a customer come into the store today who said that their ammonia levels in their tank were 1 part per million.

Which I actually had never heard of the ppm for ammonia until that moment. 

And the customer was freaking out over it because they tested their water and their levels were the 1/1,000,00 which was 'high' to them because they'd had their tank cycling for a couple of weeks? And had apparently put a betta fish into their tank and had it die in like two days.

Which...if there had been no fish in the tank before the betta...and the betta lived only two days...that's not enough time to have toxic amounts of ammonia show up in your tank...not unless the water you used to fill the tank with was already high in ammoina.

No. What was more likely was that bettas aren't always as hardy in the winter time. So more than likely they picked a betta that wasn't as healthy and it ended up not doing well with the stress of travel. 

But the customer wasn't hearing it.

They were convinced it was the ammonia levels.

And like...I have no idea how to read ppm compared to our regular water tests.

but if for every MILLION particles in the water only ONE of them is Ammonia....it sounds like the levels are rather low. Aka there should be no concern there, especially when the customer said that their nitrites and nitrates were fine.

Yet, when I tried to show them the tests we use...the customer was insistant that despite me showing them that they were more likely on the 'fine' side of the spectrum, they were under the impression that the 'low' side was the 'bad' side.

*exhales*

So I ended up recommending a couple of different fish for them to try -they decided to go for platys-and then suggested they do a 25% water change before putting the new fish into the tank.

As most problems within a tank are solved when you do a water change. So if the ammonia levels were actually the cause, the water change would help that.

Hopefully those fish do well. :S Guess we'll see if the customer shows up in the next handful of days with more dead fish....

-Sarnic Dirchi