Ro Water Planted Tank

Step by step on how to remineralize your ro water.

Ro water planted tank.

There are pros and cons to both these methods. Reverse osmosis water gives you total control of the hardness level in your planted tank. The aquarium will be a freshwater tropical tank. Normally either some tap water or one of the many products that are on the market can be used to remineralise the ro water to make it suitable for plants.

Otherwise it will be harmful to your livestock and plants a gradient can form where pure water will seek to equalize osmolarity with the water contained in living cells which have a higher amount of dissolved substances ultimately resulting in the cells swelling and potentially rupturing. Good news is most of them can be added to the ro water via plant fertilizers. It will feature heavy planting with a co2 system and high output lighting. For these minerals you will need to add them back manually on top on any plant fertilizers that you are already using.

You want water that has the. Achieving a lower ph value by mixing tap water and ro is a little more complicated because the kh value also needs to be considered and because ph values are logarithmic a mix of half ro to tap water will not halve the ph. However the ro process removes all minerals from the water even those are needed. Ro also eliminated excess nutrients that cause algae blooms in brightly lit planted tanks.

This ro water is almost completely void of any minerals or compounds that are required for healthy plants. Too many people basically are trying too hard with ro water you don t want water with nothing left in it. So if the gh of the tap water is 20 and what is needed for the fish tank is a gh of 5 mixing ro water with tap water will produce the desired result. I have been reading about the use of ro water for freshwater and constantly see reference to needing to replace minerals but no reference to what minerals these are.

If you do use rodi water as i do make sure to remineralize it before adding it to your tank. Now keep in mind the water that runs through my ro unit is relatively soft and about 100 tds so this will most likely help make the original filters last longer than harder and higher tds water. Main problem being is that you aren t sure of what is being added. Tap water is cheap to use.

I had to rant about ro water being used in a planted tank.