I bought some new swordtails to put into my 45g tank. I set up the quarantine tank to quarantine them for a couple of weeks. I took some filter media from the main tank and filled the quarantine tank with tank water and acclimated the swordtails and then put them in it. There must have not been enough bacteria in the filter media as 24 hours later ammonia and nitrite were both at 0.5ppm. I did a water change to lower the concentrations. I don't know why but I decided to check the ammonia level in my tap water and lo and behold it came out at 1 ppm - hence water changes with tap water on the quarantine tank are not a good idea. I've checked the tap water before and it was 0, I think it may be high since we are going into spring here and the council has added more chemicals at this time if year.

What I did then was remove 50% of the water and topped it up with tank water again which has 0 ammonia and 0 nitrite. I then topped up the main tank with tap water. I'm not concerned about putting the tap water into the main tank as I'm only putting 15 liters of water into a 175 litre tank so it is diluted and the tank has enough bacterial colonies to break down the ammonia that is in the tap water anyway.

Now, this is where my question comes in. I know that the council put chloramine into the water as a treatment. I use nutrafin aqua plus as a treatment when I do water changes which neutralizes chlorine and chloramine. Now, as I understand it chloramine is a compound of chlorine and ammonia. Would I be getting high ammonia readings as a result of high chloramine?

If the tap water continues at 1ppm, every time I do a 25% water change the concentration of the ammonia in the tank will be 0.25ppm after every water change, the filter should take care of it quickly but the fish are still going to be exposed to it for a time. Should I perhaps be using some thing to help the situation? Any advice would be useful. I don't want to be adding chemicals unneccessarily.

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45g pentagonal
4 Swordtails, 2 dwarf Gouramis, 5 Mollies, 1 Rainbow Shark, 6 Molly fry 6 zebra danios

88 gal Malawi tank
4 Yellow labs, 1 Baenshi, 2 Borleyis, 3 Trewavas, 2 Livingstonis, 1 Venustus, 2 Green Terrors

We have the same problem, took weeks to level our after we set up our tank, idk how our poor fishes survived it. Anyhow, we use Tetra Ammonia Safe Tablets and they seem to work fairly well. Haven't had a problem sense we started using them. They sell other stuff as well that will do the same.