Do I need to know anything about water softeners and aquariums? (1 Viewer)

[Triggerman]

Hello everyone, I just moved to the Cinco Ranch area of Katy, and am looking into putting in a water softener. I wanted to know will the added salt in the softener wreak havoc on my water perameters, and any additional advise on the matter would be great as I have never had a whole house water softener before to worry about.

 

[tektite]

Do you have an RO/DI unit?

 

[d2mini]

Yeah, you still need to run it through a ro/di which will remove everything anyway. A water softener does not remove enough junk.
I'm across the street from you in CCR and have a whole house water softener along with a RO/DI and it's fine.

 

[Triggerman]

I was not sure if a RO/DI unit was needed with your guy's water type. I was just doing some research on the water softener systems. I want to keep sps after the tank matures, and noticed that the softeners strip down the mag and calcium, which would mean additional dosing at a earlier stage. I have a filtered water tap that I was going to use to fill the tank as it kept all the calcium and mag, but removed the aspects of the water that typically cause problems. I ran RO water in my last setup as we had hard water. What do most guys here use?

Do you have an RO/DI unit?

 

[tektite]

Most people use RO/DI here, not great water to use straight, especially for SPS.

There's not enough calcium or magnesium in tapwater to matter. In order to keep what's there you also keep a LOT of other stuff that you might not want. Check your local water source too, to see if you have chlorine or chloramines in your water. Most places around Houston have moved to chloramines, that takes carbon specific to chloramines to remove it. A tapwater filter is not nearly good enough for saltwater aquariums. Starting out with RO/DI water just helps in the long run, using tapwater to start the tank out even if you move to RO/DI when you go toward the harder corals to keep, you'll have a lot more initial algae/cyano/diatom problems with nutrients/silicates in the tapwater.