Water?

new2me

Since i dont have a r/o system can i boil the water first to get things started, or do i have to make many trips to the grocery store?
Also how long should i wait to add live rock and or sand?


This is for a 75 gal. canister set-up for fish only.

Sorry as you can tell all of this is new 2 me.

Loman

Hello New2me,

Personally I would not boil the water. I have not performed tests to validate this but I could see that boiling the water actually increases the level of pollutants in the water. My thinking is that the water that boils away will condense somewhere and be essentially pure water (aside from the material it condenses upon). Any material in the water will more or less stay in the pan and there will be less pure water remaining.

In a salt tank you want to control what goes into very carefully which is why we suggest people use RO or distilled (nearly pure) water. If that is not really an option then I would test my tap water to make sure it was not really bad in a given aspect and try to use it. Once you get the water to the right salinity and temperature I would add the live sand. I would probably wait a day or two to add the rock just to keep the time out of the tank to a minimum because but you could probably add it at the same time

Nereaga

After I dumped my sand in it was too cloudy for me to try and scape the rock.... I waited 2 days before I put the LR in.... But as Loman said you can put it in right away with the sand...