HELP with treating water with my new system!

[Brandon nardoianni]

I'm kind of stuck in a dilemma here.  I have filled my entire aquaponics system with city water that after doing research ( a little late I might add) has chloramine in it.  I found that using a reverse osmosis carbon filter (Hydrologics Stealth RO 200) It will be able to remove 98% of all impurities in the water including the chloramine.  I did read about many different products that "remove chloramine" but all of them said that they simply break down the chloramine into chlorine and ammonia so that will still not do what Is needed to start cycling right? 

 Click here to see the Filter I purchased today that I will be using

My main question is that I already have the whisper pump running into the fish tank and everything is working fine. I dont want to mess that up. The last thing I want to do is have to drain 1200 gallons of water and waste that much money and insult mother nature by wasting that much water.  I'm sure she is already very angry for all of it I wasted washing my gravel ;) What I was thinking of doing was keeping the system running and since the RO filter can only cycle 200 gallons a day (8.3 gallons per hour) to get a very small pump and put it in the sump tank and feed the outlet of the RO filter also into the fish tank being that it will not have the power to overflow the fishtank with the only 8 gallons per hour feeding into the tank in addition to the whisper pump already.  ( I am using a CHIFT PIST model that is working AWESOME by the way)

My dillema is that I dont know if by mixing the filtered water from the RO filter into the fish tanks with the non filtered water containing chloramine and other contaminants from city water, if it will take longer to completely filter all of the water than if I just dumped it all out and started fresh. 

Also how will I be able to test the water to be sure all of the chloramines are out of the water once I am done filtering it.  Does anyone have any good links to test for chloramine?

If anyone could shed some expertise on this I would greatly appreciate it!

[TCLynx]

You can use a chlorine removers like sodium thiosulfate and you will have some ammonia left over in your water.  No worries if you are planning on doing fishless cycling.  Just means you have your first does already started once you condition your water. 

Use the filter for future water top ups

[Brandon nardoianni]

wow really? lol well guess I prematurely bought that.  How long does the sodium thoisulfate take to work? 

[TCLynx]

Seeing as I use well water and rain water, I've never had to use the stuff so I don't have any labels here to look at.I've never personally needed to use it so hopefully some one who has used it can chime in here.