When making large water changes make sure you match the temperature of your aquarium water. Saltwater fish will stress and die quickly if drastic changes in temperature occur in the aquarium.

Also remember to make slow changes to your water parameters. Quick changes will cause problems as well.

Edmonton uses chloramine to treat their water. Running a dechlorinator or RO unit in Edmonton is a gamble due to the ammonia bond.


I doubt it had much of anything to do with the dead fish, but I agree that a RO/DI would be a good investment, and probably solve your algae problems as well. Edmonton's water tests really nice on a TDS meter, but the chloramine makes a proper RO/DI necessary in my opinion. You can get a decent three stage RO/DI on ebay for around 170$.

i have been useing tap warter for a year now in edmonton with no real isues.
but a friend of mine had a beautiful reef going for over a year and suddenly everything just started dieing corals fish evrything and it turned out his refactomeeter was wonky and he was reading 1.023 but in accuality it was 1.001 now i dont know if had you perameters checked at the lfs but maby it something as simpel as a bad salinity tester.
most stores will test your water for you just my two cents :) oh and if that is the case dont do what he did and changed his water to proper lvls over night and killed off the rest of his live stock :(

Holy crap never thought about this. I'm using the 15 dollar tester from the LFS. If a 100$ tester can go bad, I can only imagine how far off my salinity really is.

check your ph as well .Out here the tap water was at 3.5 probably cause its spring somewhere lol

judging by your tag below each post those fluval 404's make me cringe. How often do you clean them? ever thought about getting rid of them

This post is from a year ago guys...