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Re: Reconstituting RO water
Several posts recently have mentioned reconstituting RO water with commercial additives, such as
Kent RO-Right. While I have nothing against these products, I will share my experience over the
past seven months with the much cheaper alternative of using synthetic sea salt instead.
On the advice of an early post on the list, I have been reconstituting RO water with 1 tbl
spoon of sea salt and 1/2 tbl spoon sodium bicarbonate per 10 gallons of water, a combination which
gives a KH of about 3-4 (bicarbonate) and a GH of about 2 (from the sea salt). This seems to work
satisfactorily for my three soft-water tanks. With very light supplementation of Kent Aquatic Plant
supplement (keeping iron at or below 0.1 ppm), I have had continous, lush growth of Amazon swords,
Ludwigia, Crypt. balansae, Rotala macrandra, Water sprite, Rotala indica, and some other Crypts.
Furthermore, a pair of angels has produced far more offspring than I have been able to keep, and
schools of cardinal tetras, Otos and SAE's, as well as four small Ciclids (checkerboard??), seem to
be thriving.
Sea salt is much cheaper than the RO-Right, and contains some potassium, magnesium,
calcium, and some other trace ions, in addition to the sodium chloride. At this level of
supplementation, the sodium chloride concentration does not appear to be a serious problem for my
tanks.
Incidently, I use RO water because of the high phosphate (1 ppm) and very hard water
delivered to my sink by my local water company in South Texas!
If you object to paying for special jars of mixed salts, you might try sea salt. A box
lasts a long time!
Rick Denney, Dickinson, TX
rdenney at ibm_net