Distilled water trouble

[reefsrule]

I just purchased three gallons of distilled water and I added 1 and a half cups of salt. But when I use the hydrometer it turns really low. It doesn't do that in my tank which has tap water in it right now. Does distilled water need more salt? I need more water quickly because I need to get the bag of water out of the tank that the snail and crab came in. If I take it out the filter wont work without water.

[tinyreef]

the distilled 'needs' more salt most likely because there was some dissolved solids in the tap which gave it a higher specific gravity to the relatively pure distilled. remember that the hydronmeter measures specific gravity not salinity.

 

raise the salt content of the distilled and that approaches the 'true' reading. be careful to acclimate your system to this 'new' salinity.

 

be careful using tap and inverts. i find them much less tolerant of tap issues than fish or even some corals.

 

if the inverts are the first additions to the tank i would be inclined to switch to distilled. if not, then you may want to stay with the tap to not shock the other existing livestock. hth

[Infiniti]

why did the ppl from my pet store say not to use distilled water??? they said only use RO or deionized water. does RO/DI means reverse osmosis/deionized? or distilled?

[Vincerama]

DI means de-ionized water. There is a resin in the deionizer unit that acts like fly-paper to certain impurities. Ie; phosphate will stick to it, so that the resulting water is very pure.

 

Distilled water is almost pure water.

 

A lot of people use RO or RO/DI or DI or distilled or natural seawater (filtered) or even tap water or filtered tap water! Heck, it's all water! It just depends on what other stuff (dissolved solids) you let get into your tank. I'd have NO PROBLEM using distilled water! (I use RO)

 

No idea why the LFS guys told you not to use distilled...

 

V

[Infiniti]

that's good to know i can use distilled. i guess they just wanted me to buy their water. which was bad anyways. what an a-hole.

[Physh1]

Originally posted by Infiniti

that's good to know i can use distilled. i guess they just wanted me to buy their water. which was bad anyways. what an a-hole.

If I was you and someone at an LFS told me something I didn't understand I'd ask why. It will help a lot in your learning curve. You can check here if your curious about their answers but always ask.

 

Cameron

[Infiniti]

he told me that it wasn't pure water and can cause lots of algae bloom that i wouldn't want. that was the second pet store that told me that so i believed it.

[Chronicles]

distilled is pure water period. Ever taste it? Nasty stuff. Sometimes they distill it with copper pipes and you can get into trouble with that. Best thing to do is get RO/DI either from the store or your own source. Either get something like walmarts "Drinking water" NOT spring water (contains nitrates etc) or even our Weis Markets has a station outside for $.25 a gallon fillup of RO/DI water. Just check the label, 9/10 times it'll say it.

[Vincerama]

I was at the Science Center in Toronto (actually North York?) in Ontario and they had a display with PURE water. I mean...they burned hydrogen (with pur O2 of course) and you could drink the water from a fountain. It didn't taste very good (and neither with DI water) because the impurities we are USED TO tasting are simply not there. Kind of like drinking nothing! Spring water, etc, is chock full of minerals and we can taste it. So for drinking, pure water is not the greatest (nor is it good for FW tanks), but we don't want it for drinking, we want it to MIX in our own measured minerals (ie; salt mix) so it's best to start with as pure as you can get!

 

V