Metal Monday: Tap Water

[SeymourDuncan]

No! We aren't going to a Motörhead concert! Today we will talk about another type of heavy metals. Tap water is the cigarette of the reef tank. There are more contaminants allowed in tap water than the average Joe should have the mental capacity to know by heart. Check this out if you are unfamiliar with possible contaminants in your water.
http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/index.cfm

Using tap has some very scary downsides. What are some of your experiences?
What are ways you counteract the problems?
If you use RO water and play it safe you have probably noticed a difference in many things as well.. Well, water! Let's get some discussion going today!!

 

[Kimberlee]

When I first started I used tap (Portland OR) and it was fine, but than they changed something in the water supply and it was not so fine. I made the dicesion than to go w/ an RO unit. If all it does is take out the unknown factor it is worth every cent. I now get a quarterly report from my water company and it is scary what they let us drink. I don't drink the tap either, and almost feel like using RO for everything would be healthier than tap. It is mindblowing what they let us drink in our water and there is no way it could be good for a reef. Just my.2 though

 

[SeymourDuncan]

well humans actually benefit from some of the metals and things along with freshwater plants. Our orchids wont grow when we use RO but tap makes them explode.

 

[Kimberlee]

Yes but the radio active waste they consider un harmful and allow so much in our water....is not good for anyone or any thing. And yes there is so much waste allowed in the public supply. They say it is a safe level, I beg to differ that there is a safe level. But yes heavy metals to some degree are required for some most life.

 

[SeymourDuncan]

Yeah, Radioactivity is only good when it is Radio Activity, as in music lol!

 

[beaslbob]

I used tap water with no water changes in a 55g tank that ran for 9 years with a heavy fish load and a mix of soft type corals.

I also used the diy two part system for cal, alk, mag.

The tank was also maintained with a diy wet-dry filter with crushed oyster shells as filter media.

And macro algaes.

I also spot fed the corals with cylopeeze.

 

[mcarroll]

Best tap water story I know is from a friend whose tank contracted AEFW's.

He essentially gave up on the tank due to AEFW for ~4 months, doing nothing but tap water top-offs to care for it during that time.

Eventually he had a reason to clean the glass and try to get the tank cleaned up. When he looked in, his acros were fine and all sign of AEFW were gone!

-Matt

 

[SeymourDuncan]

Killing aefw with TAPWATER...interesting lol!!

 

[StevenBell]

Sounds like the only card needed is the ace od spades...

 

[Mike in CT]

If you think tap water is scary, take a look at bottled water and the such. City water supplies are highly regulated while other sources of water are much less so. I ran a fish only tank for that used tap and I had no problem keeping most of my fish 10 plus years. I am using rodi now since converting over to a reef tank. I am finding out corals are much more temperamental then fish when it comes to water quality!

 

[AZDesertRat]

Being a certified water treatment plant operator and manager myself I would not hesitate to drink the tap water anywhere in the US. I used tap for the first 15 years of my saltwater fish only hobby and 10 years of my reef hobby and other than fighting constant algae problems things were pretty stable. At the time our water sources were 100% deep wells and in the early years we did not even chlorinate the system.
The Utility sold to the City and sources changed from wells to treated surface water and the battle was on. I almost quit the hobby beofre finding a Water & Ice store that actually did a good job even though it was RO only. They were able to take the then 680 TDS water down to 13-15 TDS which I was very pleased with and my systems improved dramatically.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a RO drinking water system for our home as they were going through bad MIB and Geosmin blue green algae phases and were bringing on a new untested surface water plant so our water quality sucked and it smelled horrible, you gagged when you got in the shower. MIB and Geosmin are so pungent even a few parts per billion is very offensive to the human nose. Once I had the RO things continued about the same but I was still lacking DI. I also got rid of the original RO and went to a AWI Typhoon III but was experiencing short DI life so that system wen taway and I invested in my first Spectrapure system. This is not intended to be a sales pitch and that will be the only mention of brand names but during all this process I kept log books on water quality, usage and component life and I documented the differences between one system and another and it was eye opening to say the least.

I have been using RO/DI for over 15 years now and would never even consider going back to tap. Again, I wouldn't hesitate to drink it but I feel stability is very important and you do not find stability in most municipal treatment and distribution systems.