Reef nutrition

Tap water + Amquel + salt for initial tank fill?

Vincerama2

Vincerama2

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Hi guys, so Wifebane is slowly moving along. I put some water in, just to clean out 3 years of dust.

I'm wondering if, for the initial massive 180g fill, I could use tap water + amquel as the water, versus RO or RO/DI ? I'm using old sand, plus one 20 lbs bag of virgin sand. And my rocks have been spider apartments on the driveway for 2 years. So obviously there will be a lot of stinky cycling going on.

An alternative is just running the line from my RO/DI prefilters into the tank, so the water is at least filtered...but again, with all the other crap coming in from sand and rocks ... does it make a difference?

My RO/DI is like 75G a day, in theory ... that's 3 days of running it (and the waste water usage) if I go RO/DI.

Of course I'll use RO/DI for post cycling water changes.

Any thoughts?

Vince
 
What's your TDS coming out of the faucet? In SF my TDS can range from 8 to 26, so it might be OK.

If it were me, I'd start with RO/DI water. Otherwise every time I had a problem I'd be wondering if it was from the initial start-up.
 
Play it safe. Use RODI and wash the crap out of the rock. It may be beneficial to acid wash the rock just to be sure. Every preventative step you take is a lot less effort than trying to fix it afterwards.
 
Umm .... 3 days is nothing in this hobby.
:)

My bet is it you will get way more crud from the rocks than the water by a long shot.
+1 on washing rocks and sand.

A difference concern with tap water is chemical balance when you add salt mix.
If you have hard/soft water, it will mess up the calcium/alk balance, and it
may be a pain to get that straightened out.
 
I will second what Mark said, I came to the conclusion that the previous owner of my tank had been dumping tap water in the system because when I picked it up the only surviving livestock was rocks/sand & a single clown (with coraline EVERYWHERE) he'd killed everything else off.
The main indicator to me that he'd used tap water was the completely out of whack calcium/alk measurement, it didn't matter what I added or dosed or what salt mix I used for the first 8 months at least calcium was through the roof & alk in the bottom of the range at a persistent 6, it took a year of dosing & weekly water changes before the parameters stabilized, actually my calcium is still really high but with stable ph, mg & alk I don't mind the extra calcium since my sps seem to be loving it.
 
+1 to RO/DI

You don't want to start with a water chemistry problem. During the time you are thinking about it, you can have it just filling up a couple [new] trash bins.
 
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