Ro Water Or Not ?

woodster

New Member
Joined
Jan 4, 2006
Messages
22
Reaction score
0
I'm planning a 180 litre planted set-up and have access to a constant supply of RO water as I also keep marines. I am probably not going to be keeping discus in the new tank however would it be a good idesa for the care of the plants to use RO, a mix or RO & tapwater or merely treated tapwater ?

If a mix of the two any idea of what type of % ratio to mix ?

I expect I'll be keeping tetras, barbs & possibly angels.

Cheers,
Ian.
 
I myself have a marine, not sure how RO would work in freshwater with the plants as there is no phosphates in RO and plants use it to grow.
 
RO water is perfect, but you do need to add a conditioner to the water to put back back in all the good stuff that plants / fish need.
 
What's your tap water like? GH, KH, nitrates, phosphate etc?

The mixing ratio depends obviously on your tap water. RO has zero hardness so use basic maths. Personally I use a 50:50 mix. My tap water is hard (GH 12, KH 7) so diluting it by 50% brings the hardness down to levels that both my plants and fish prefer i.e. KH 3.5, GH 6.

My tap PO4 levels are also 5+ppm which is a little high even for a heavily planted tank.

I'm still not sure if most plants prefer harder or softer water, obviously to a certain degree it depends on your plants but I know most will grow in hard water as long as there's enough CO2 and other nutrients. Soft water does make it "easier" for the plants to utilise some micronutrients I believe, hard water can oxidise these rapidly.

As a general rule plants that come from soft water habitats can do well in all types of water but hard water originating plants i.e. Vallis, Egeria, Baby Tears and some Crypts (balansae I think) need hard water and will soon die in very soft water.

Your fish selection will prefer softer water but if they've been tank bred and acclimitised to harder water then hardness isn't really an issue unless you want to try breeding.

Personally I'd avoid pure RO in the planted tank. You can buy re-mineralising powders etc. but in my experience they fail to add enough plant nutrients, I've tried Kent and Tropic Marin products with little success. Better to use the stuff already present in tap, cheaper and easier too. You could use pure RO and dose with all the necessary dry ferts including MgSO4 and Ca based to get the hardness and buffering capacity up but this is for the more experienced planted hobbyist I would suggest.

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks very much for the advice folks, I guess I need to check out the ph, hardness, nitrate & phosphate of my tapwater first :*)

I was hoping that people would suggest that it was preferable to use tapwater though as it seems to be a lot more 'stable' in the long run and probably a lot less hassle having to mix it up.
 
OK, here goes the tapwater test results :

Nitrate - 0

Phosphate - 3mg/l

kh - 20mg/l

gh - 40mg/l

ph - approx 6.4

So it seems as though my tapwater is quite soft although I'm not sure how you convert my results above for kh & gh into the sort of readings you stated earlier i.e. gh 12, kh 7 ?
 
Your water is very soft, some may say too soft and if you wish to inject CO2 may require buffering to get your KH up a bit.

RO is certainly not required.

To convert degrees to ppm or mg/l multiply by 17.9 or divide ppm by 17.9 to get degrees.
 

Most reactions

Back
Top