Another article on RO/DI units from Reefkeeping Magazine....
http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2005-05/rhf/index.php
Well, my hair was on fire yesterday over the .5 ppm ammonia in our RO/DI water.
Today, I'm not so sure this is such a huge issue. We've kept reefs since 1999. Chloramine has been in Edmonton's water long before we began reefkeeping. Up until 2003, we used RO water. When we moved to our new condo in Feb 2003, we switched to RO/DI.
In all that time, we did not appear to have any problems with the water going into our various tanks, ranging from 2.5g and 7g nanos, to our old 180g, to our present 37g, 67g and 120g reefs. For awile, we kept seahorses using this water. Overall, fish have been in good health, unless we introduced sick fish to a tank, or unless we experienced toxic events from dead exotic inverts. Corals, for the most part, have also been in good health, though in the early years we were not particularly aware on proper reef chemistry and I'm sure they all could have used better care in that area. Inverts have been doing well, too.
So now we find out that our RO/DI water has .5 ppm ammonia. It has probably always been present and we simply did not know about it. What are we going to do now that we have more knowledge? I don't know. Dear husband will read the articles and threads, maybe ask some questions and implement a few solutions, like an inline TDS meter, and more frequent filter/membrane changes. Or, we may continue on doing as we have always done and maybe just add Prime to the water after salting it.
I would still like as many Edmonton reefers as possible to check the ammonia coming out of their RO or RO/DI units and report it to this thread. I'm kind of wondering why only Gizmo has tested his water. Maybe the "ignorance is bliss" attitude may be at work here, or folks haven't read the thread, or nobody wants to take 7 minutes out of their busy schedules to test their water, though these are obviously just guesses.
Anyway, Edmonton reefers,
PLEASE test your RO or RO/DI water for ammonia and post your findings to this thread!
TIA
