I maintain two tanks one in West Vancouver and one in North Vancouver and use RO/Di for both tanks.
The water quality is amazing in my opinion, North Van TDS out of the tap is 8-9 and west van 7-8.. only issue is the PSI on both lines which is 43PSI; from all my research I found out that most older buildings are required to run a top of 40-45 PSI due to old lines which can easily burst if higher pressure runs through them along with drastic temperature changes.
I am assuming that's low enough to use for a reef tank, however I will not take any chances which can potentially take months to remedy if not longer and in some cases it can never be reversed if there is ever a loss of livestock.
Every tank I've seen using tap water has some sort of algae issue and the owners have never been able to keep it down... for example Aquariums West in DT uses tap water and the guy there doesn't quite understand why his main display RSM S500 has algae... I like the shop and I bought a RSM S500 there but the guy should really know not to top off the water with direct tap water treated for chlorine and use tap water for water changes...
Now while we test for TDS and get a reading, how does one know what exactly is in the water at any given time?? parameters change all the time and I'm sure the water quality changes on regular basis as well and the ones using tap water have absolutely no idea what is in the water today vs last week vs next week and so on...
A decent RO unit runs about 300$ mark which is well worth it considering how much we invest in our tanks. Also why spend hundreds of dollars on testing kits and refills etc if the water used is from the tap??
In my opinion, the savings from using tap water vs RO/Di water are just not worth the risk.
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Casual reefer
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