PatW
New member
If your water is good, you can probably get by with tap water and frequent water changes especially if you go fish only or soft corals.
If you have a large system or want to have sps corals, you should get an RODI system.
There are a number of venders who sell RODI systems online: bulk Reef Supply, spectrapure, buckeye Supply etc (I hope I got the names right).
If your water is good with few impurities, an RODI system will not have to work hard and should be cheap to run.
I have a 6 stage BRS system. It has a sediment filter, a 5 micron carbon filter, a .5 micron carbon filter. The sediment filter removes particulates, the carbon blocks remove chlorine not a big deal in a well based source. These filters are cheap so I figure the more the merrier. The next stage. Is the RO membrane. It removes about 99 percent of the TDS. My water is about 150 tds and it comes out at 2. The DI resin is the last stage. It absorbs the remaining stuff yielding 0 tds water. I run two in a row. Resin isn't cheap. I can fully deplete a canister and then repack it. I don't waste resin by discarding a 90 percent depleted canister to be sure I have 0 tds.
If you water is about 50 tds, you could even just run the prefilters and RO membrane if you wanted to be cheap. Also since you have a water softener most of your tds is probably NaCl which is benign.
As for testing, you could go to a local reef aquarium store and have them test your water for phosphates, nitrates, and tds for a minor fee. Getting your well water tested by a water testing service is a good idea.
If you have a large system or want to have sps corals, you should get an RODI system.
There are a number of venders who sell RODI systems online: bulk Reef Supply, spectrapure, buckeye Supply etc (I hope I got the names right).
If your water is good with few impurities, an RODI system will not have to work hard and should be cheap to run.
I have a 6 stage BRS system. It has a sediment filter, a 5 micron carbon filter, a .5 micron carbon filter. The sediment filter removes particulates, the carbon blocks remove chlorine not a big deal in a well based source. These filters are cheap so I figure the more the merrier. The next stage. Is the RO membrane. It removes about 99 percent of the TDS. My water is about 150 tds and it comes out at 2. The DI resin is the last stage. It absorbs the remaining stuff yielding 0 tds water. I run two in a row. Resin isn't cheap. I can fully deplete a canister and then repack it. I don't waste resin by discarding a 90 percent depleted canister to be sure I have 0 tds.
If you water is about 50 tds, you could even just run the prefilters and RO membrane if you wanted to be cheap. Also since you have a water softener most of your tds is probably NaCl which is benign.
As for testing, you could go to a local reef aquarium store and have them test your water for phosphates, nitrates, and tds for a minor fee. Getting your well water tested by a water testing service is a good idea.
