Local Water - just FYI

[KingOfAll_Tyrants]

As I've mentioned before, I'm prepping to set up a tank and I'm starting to get all the stuff I need (and receiving in the process random small livestock I'm not really prepped to handle yet  but that's a separate story)

 

One thing I'm doing is looking at my water; I wanted to look at local filtered water by the Primo machines like you find in Wal-mart (basically for curiosity, since i have some tetra test strips lying around).   Here's what we have (all located in Arlington County):

 

From the Tap:

trates: ~10

trites: ~0

Hardness GH PPM: ~100

cholrine: ~0.8ppm

KH: ~80

pH: ~8.0

TDS: like 210

 

Pur Filter (not fresh; we have this at home and we drink from it):

trates: ~10

trites: ~0

Hardness GH PPM: ~100

cholrine: ~0

KH: ~80

pH: ~7.5

TDS: like 210

 

Primo machine RO water (40 cents a gallon):

trates: ~5

trites: 0

Hardness GH PPM: ~0

cholrine: 0

KH: ~0

pH: ~6.8-7

TDS: like 19

 

Conclusion: the Pur filter is of course useless for the aquarium and not too useful for humans (I'm not sure if the chlorine reduction is due to the filter or due to it sitting for over a day.  It does make the water taste better, IMO.   

 

The filtered water is does not seem to be usable for reef purposes (TDS; no idea what those DS' are but I assume its not good).     hat being said, it may be usable for FOWLR.  When I was thinking of going freshwater (amazon biotope) I was a bit concerned about getting my water hardness and pH down for the (admittedly captive bred) amazon fish (neons, discuss, angels,etc.).  Whether or not such pH/hardness is desirable for captive bred FW fish is one question; however, it is good to know that  you can commercially get enough water roughly in the ballpark your looking for, for a small amazon tank, at your local wallyworld.   The water probably would have been much better for my orchids than the tap water, too bad I didn't know sooner.  

Edited July 28, 2017 by KingOfAll_Tyrants

[KingOfAll_Tyrants]

Small addition.....as part of my ICP test with ATI, they will do a free extra test of a RODI sample you give them.   

 

So after getting plenty of results with "everything is 0, your RODI is fine",  I decided to send them Arlington county tap water (at least as it comes out in my building!).  

 

Most parameters were zero (even, oddly, nitrates), except for the following:

 

Silicon    3100 µg/l (supposedly from a quick google search "The silica content in natural waters is commonly in the 5 to 25 mg/L range, although concentrations over 100mg/L occur in some areas")

Barium    23.49 µg/l

Copper    3.37 µg/l. (far below ostensibly dangerous levels, it seems to me from a google search.   Arlington county's 2018 water quality report says that their range of detected levels were 0.01 – 0.19......hmm.......)

Zinc    6.45 µg/l

Phosphorus    710.3 µg/l    
Phosphate    2.17 mg/l

Aluminium    21.97 µg/l. (note: according to the WI department of Health, "the World Health Organization has recommended that aluminum levels in community water supplies should not exceed 0.2 mg/L.".  So this theoretically should be fine for drinking water, it seems) 

 

This is obviously not what we want for reefing.  I don't even know if I'd want any of this in a simple freshwater tank, though only phosphate an Al look like they're problematically high levels......

 

Edited April 24, 2020 by KingOfAll_Tyrants