RO or City of Edmonton Water?
 

I was at 2 quality stores today and was given two different opinions, as to the type of water I should use. My tank is 1 week old and the PH is a little low (7.9) One store told me never to use RO water, as it does not contain any minerals. Another store told me to only use RO water and a high quality reef salt which adds the minerals, never, never use Edmonton water as it is too high in ammonia levels.

Our water is well water, that cannot be used for tanks, so I have to either buy City or RO water. I would really appreciate some feedback on this.

Thank you

I would go with a quality ro. With city it is a mixed bag and you never really know what will be in there. Whereas with ro (especially ro/di) you can always add in only the minerals you want, whether that be with a good quality salt or with just the minerals themselves. (kent products, etc.)

IMHO I would recommend for anyone new to the hobby; going with a high quality salt and the ro or ro/di and worrying about possible additives later when more experienced. If the tank doesn't have hard coral or sps chances are you might not have to add anything.

Edmonton water is higher in chlorine than most in alberta as it has a lot of pipe to cover as we supply the whole capital region with water. Other than that we have pretty good water. I would like to get an ro myself but haven't yet and I've used tap water since I started reefkeeping and haven't seen any direct problems from using it.

You can buy good quality RO/DI units for around $200. Best $200 I ever spent! No more packing water up to the second storey of my condo. Considering a 5 gallon jug of water costs about $2 the RO/DI unit will pay for itself after 500 gallons, not including the amount of time and fuel it takes you to go buy RO water. PLUS, making your own RO/DI water you get to use water with 0 tds...can't get any better than that. I was buying RO water before and found out it had a tds of 8 ppm...probably the cause of the various algaes I was waging war against for the last 8 months.

Do yourself a favor, and DEFINATELY do not use tap water...oh and don't listen to any other advice the person that told you that has either!!! LOL!

My tank has been running for over 2 years with tap water and Prime and I have never had a problem. And I keep all kinds of coral, softies, sps and LPS and a good friend of mine has had his tank running as long as mine with tap water and his corals grow like crazy.

Tap water + Prime here too, was using bottled RO but switched back to tap as i could see no difference in the growth or health of my tank. I keep softies, LPS, SPS, clams, etc. and none of them seem to mind. But if you don't have the option on tap water straight from your tap, i would just get an RODI system setup. My 2cents.

Re: Water
 

In your specific situation, get an RO/DI unit.

I've personally used tap water with Prime for 4 years now in my reef, and have had no major problems. Have had hair algae at times early on, but fairly easy to control. Edmonton's water isn't that bad.

It's funny that some on here are religious in their view to ONLY using RO water...they imply that you are stupid for not using it. But as you can see, many people use tap water with the appropriate chemicals to remove chlorine and chlorimines and it's not a life and death problem.

My tap water has a relatively low tds of 92 ppm. I used it years ago for my marine tanks, and always battled algae.

Potentially a serious issue for freshwater tanks but not applicable for marine tanks.

Kind of true but not the whole picture. You won't see practically any free ammonia in tap water here. You don't find any free chlorine either, they treat the water with chloramine which is chlorine and ammonia bonded together. Some decholrinator products do not do an adequate job of dealing with chloramine so if you go with tap water make sure you use something good like Prime. Bad ones break the bond but don't deal with the ammonia correctly, hence the ammonia concern.

A basic RO unit also can have issues with chloramine. You should really use a unit that has quality carbon prefilters and a post RO Deionization (DI) stage. This will also remove things like phosphate and silicate from the water

Seeing as though you are on a well though getting an RO/DI unit to perform well can be a real problem. Depending on how much stuff is in the source water you may have to add extra prefilter stages for sediment. If your dissolved solids level in the well water is too high (I saw 2500 ppm recently) you may have to use 2 RO membranes together so you don't exhaust your DI cartridges too quickly. Water pressure may also be an issue, RO membranes work well at 50 psi and higher. On a well you may need a booster pump to get that. This could add up to a significant cost, like $700.

All things considered you may be better off with city water. If you want to investigate setting up an RO/DI unit pm me and I'll give you a hand.

But what were those 92 ppm? You could find places that had almost all of the dissolved minerals being calcium and magnesium salts and others where 4 ppm of that is phosphate and silicate. That would cause algae problems. TDS is a cruddy way of determining water quality.