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#
Don't buy aquarium water conditioners / dechlorinators

Hear me out: The conveniently sized 250ml costs ~$12 (high volumes not
much
cheaper), and to make the same thing yourself would just be 34 grams of Sodium thiosulfate and
no other ingredients
. 500 grams of Sodium thiosulfate costs $18. Like, just mix it with some water, it's a single active ingredient, mixed into water.
Oh, you can't measure it? Boo hoo. A drug scale is $6, and you're still within budget. Buy every scale on Amazon, I don't care.

###
Background

Aquarium water dechlorinators are
mostly basically
just Sodium thiosulfate. There are some variances in the exact chemical form put into the bottle, but most are roughly equivilent. Some others include formalin/formaldehyde, which I'm not a fan of to begin with, but is especially inappropriate if you plan on growing strawberries in your fish tank like me.
A good reliable dechlorinator is Seachem Prime. Some people use some basic reasoning, or a quick sniff, and come to the conclusion it is pretty much the same thing as we are about to make. There are only a few downsides to it:
•
It is expensive (compared to Sodium thiosulfate pentahydrate crystals)
•
Their marketing and legal team swear up and down it is not functionally identical to Sodium thiosulfate in a bottle (maybe with some useless additives)
•
•
🤔
•
They claim it makes ammonia temporarily vanish (you should not want this regardless)
•
•
🤔
•
apparently
some newer bottles contain formalin
With that out of the way, how much convenience does the extra price afford us? How difficult is doing it yourself? Let's DIY some water conditioner.

##
Making your own

###
What you will need

•
Milligram scale
(cheapest I found which includes a calibration weight)
•
Sodium thiosulfate
(cheapest I found in the relatively small quantity needed)

###
How to make it

•
You pour 34 grams (assuming you have the pentahydrate form) of Sodium thiosulfate into your old 250ml Seachem Prime bottle
•
You fill the rest with water

###
That's it?

I am not writing this because this is hard, or thought to be hard, or anything of the sort. I am writing this because few people realize that they are paying many times the amount they should be, for a sprinkle of crystals in a bottle of water.
There
is
however an aquarium guide I am planning on finishing writing which
is
(considered to be) a
much
harder task, and it's a profitable one!

##
Disclaimer

Some of this information was
originally
lifted from the contraversial but incredible source of information (which you can validate yourself),
aquariumscience.org
. He is not a prophet, he is also not as offensively "wrong" as you think he is.
Amazon links are
are
what I genuinely purchased, and I tend to be cheap (see:
the entire subject of this post
). They are affiliate links out of "you may as well", not deception. I only made this post to share this tip with others who are just as cheap as me, not to gain anything myself.
Seachem we love you and your preserved thalassiosira reef phyto, it is critical to another aquarium interest of mine, but your weird claims do not make me happy!