Hi everyone,
I’m considering switching over to RO water, and have a few questions I’m hoping you can all answer. A few things that I feel will be relevant:
Here are my questions:
If I go forward with RO water, I’ll need more than 55 gallons of water storage. I’ve found a tall, narrow storage tank that will hold 80 gallons of water, but the top is somewhat closed and there is a bulkhead near the bottom to connect a pump. I know that I should remineralize before pumping the water back to the tank, but my problem is that I’ll never be able to pump 100% of the storage tank out. After the first water change, how would I go about figuring out how much Ca and Mg to add to the new RO water? Would I need to calculate how much water was pumped, and change the amount of Ca and Mg I add each and every time? This feels both tedious, and prone to miscalculation.
Second question… With the rocks that I have leeching a ton of Ca, the water hardness rises a not-insignificant amount every week. When I do my water change, there is going to be a huge drop in hardness. Could this dangerous to the fauna? I don’t know exactly how much Gh and Kh leeches during the week, so I’m not really able to give exact numbers. What I do know is that my TDS currently goes up about 100 points during the week. This obviously includes fertilizers and dissolved organics, but a lot of it is hardness and Kh.
If I make the change to RO water, will the rocks leech even more hardness than they currently do, or will that not make a big difference?
I’m considering switching over to RO water, and have a few questions I’m hoping you can all answer. A few things that I feel will be relevant:
- I change about 75 gallons of water per week in a 125g tank. This would leave 50 gallons of water left, but a lot of that is taken up by substrate and hardscape. I genuinely have no idea how much water that displaces, so an accurate percentage of water changed is hard to give.
- I have about 180 lbs of Seiryu stone in my tank, along with pretty high CO2. This leeches a ton of Ca and Kh.
Here are my questions:
If I go forward with RO water, I’ll need more than 55 gallons of water storage. I’ve found a tall, narrow storage tank that will hold 80 gallons of water, but the top is somewhat closed and there is a bulkhead near the bottom to connect a pump. I know that I should remineralize before pumping the water back to the tank, but my problem is that I’ll never be able to pump 100% of the storage tank out. After the first water change, how would I go about figuring out how much Ca and Mg to add to the new RO water? Would I need to calculate how much water was pumped, and change the amount of Ca and Mg I add each and every time? This feels both tedious, and prone to miscalculation.
Second question… With the rocks that I have leeching a ton of Ca, the water hardness rises a not-insignificant amount every week. When I do my water change, there is going to be a huge drop in hardness. Could this dangerous to the fauna? I don’t know exactly how much Gh and Kh leeches during the week, so I’m not really able to give exact numbers. What I do know is that my TDS currently goes up about 100 points during the week. This obviously includes fertilizers and dissolved organics, but a lot of it is hardness and Kh.
If I make the change to RO water, will the rocks leech even more hardness than they currently do, or will that not make a big difference?