Disstilled Water

J

Joshjohnson

New member
Well for the past few weeks i have been using disstilled water for my top of and also been having problems with a cyano outbreak since i put on my new lights. I have been reducing the amount of time my lights on, reduced feeding uped my water changes and just put a aqua c remora skimmer on the tank. The cyano is still holding its on and today when i got home it looked like it is spreading. i just topped of my tank yesterday and thought maybe the disstilled water had phos. So i tested my top of water and it had a reading of .50 ppm which is the low end of my test kit. I thought that disstilled water wouldn't have phos. Is this wrong?

Also is there anything that i am not doing to help reduce this red slime crap in my tank.
 
Good question Josh, I would also like to know the answer as I am about to fill up my 45 and had planned to use distilled also.
 
Hi Josh,
That sounds very strange, with my RO it is 0. I would question if that is truely disstilled water. For that matter what else is in it. :hmm2:

Are you siphoning off the red slime before each water change? If not it will help get rid of it faster. From what I've heard this will take 5 days to two weeks, and that is siphoning more than just once a day.
 
i try to siphon it off beut it is very diffcult to get the siphon to the spots that it is growing and also when i do siphon some areas in the sand it just pulls all the sand up and makes a huge mess but never really ends up in my bucket. I think by trying to siphon it up it has helped to spread it to other areas of my tank.

Also my LFS said that for a 47 gallon tank that i should have around 20 to 40 snails ( my jaw just dropped to the floor), does this sound right?
 
People IMO put to many snails/crabs etc in for the clean-up crews. I have a 75 gallon and put in 10 Astrea snails, 10 Nassarius and 10 red legged crabs. They've done a great job and so far that is all I need. I would get at first 15 to 20 and just see how things go - you have a problem now and you don't want more by adding to much livestock at one time. If they can keep up with the algae then that's all that is needed.

I have some different types of algae growing now and the above crew will eat it, so I'll get like 5 more snails to take care of that.

For your size of tank and depending on the load, 20 to 30 or so I would not think is over doing it. This is just MO!

I could see it being a problem trying to siphon out, but I would try to get out what you can without causing more problems.
 
Oh sorry Josh - I'm not sure what snails will eat cyano if any, but I'll check it out and see if I can find any.
 
i have one maxi 900 and one 1200 and another 1200 running my skimmer. The 900 i just put in yesterday to increase flow. do you think i need more?
 
FYI I was getting distilled water in 1 gallon jugs from publix when i was running my 20 nano and found phosphates registered one out of 4 gallons. Useing the more expensive water lowered that but The publix and other cheap brands had some weird quality control issues.
 
If you think phosphate is the problem, Dr. Randy Holmes-Farley has a great article in last months RK Magazine. BTW is was great to meet you Sunday.
 
it should evantually subside with good maintainance. have you added any new rock lately?? sometimes certain rocks will leach phos or organics and cause a bloom. good flow also helps.... save your self some money in the long run and get a good ro/di for 100.00. or I can sell you water :).. (need to finance this hobby somehow)
 
That's what I heard also Josh, but you do have to keep at it and it will go away. I agree with poknsnok, my RO system was the best piece of equipment that I've purchased for my tanks.
 
for the most part i buy my water salt and top off from my lfs which has always tested good but the few past weeks kind of got a little lazy and did not want to drive to my lfs so i used distilled instead. The only thing i did different to my tank was upgraded from cheap run of the mill lights to 150 watt MH's. then a week later added my skimmer and one more power head to increase flow. I stopped by my lfs today got some RO/DI for top off and bought a kh test kit as well, but i don't know if kh has anything to do with the red slime but everybody told me that i needed one. Now i have tested my water for kh and came up with 214.8 ppm, what in the heck does that mean and is that high, low, bad, i have no idea at all what this means.
 
From my understanding the carbonate hardness (KH) is also known as Alkalinity and Buffering Capacity. The test is used to determine the proper dose of pH buffers. With the problems you are having it will tell you how your biological filtration is working, bottom line what kind of stress your fish are under because of the cyano. I monitor my pH to tell me where my KH is at high/low. You're test kit instructions should tell you what levels are good.
 
the fish and inverts all seem to be happy swimming sround picking at rocks chasing air bubbles (my strawberry basslet loves to do this) and eating well. As far as my KH test kit it did not give me a chart for what is good or bad.

All of test read o
ph 8.3
sg 1.25
temp 79
 
Josh that is great news - your reading look good. It sounds like the water changes you have been doing is really paying off. I was reading about people have their livestock die because of the cyano breakout. If they are acting normal, eating and not seemingly stressed that is a very good sign. I checked on the normal reading of KH but couldn't find good information. I'll look for more later- right now it seems your are doing a good job only thing is you have to keep it up.
 
Hi Josh,
I found a scale on my test kit (Nutrafin) that I use for my freshwater but it's also good for salt. This is in mg/L so might have to convert. It says for saltwater 105 - 125 mg/L is ideal range. I would question any test kit that doesn't come with a scale- how do you know what's good?
 
well it has a scale that indicates low and high but it does not state the ideal range to be in. I geuss i need to go and buy one ofthose high dollars test kits (when will it ever stop).
 
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