Treated Well Water Quality

[Allay]

How can one get a handle on water quality when:

The well water starts off orange coloured with orange jello accumulating on the raw intake  pipe.

The raw water is injected with micro air bubbles on it's way to a settling tank where it passes through a spray bar. (off gases)

Then passes through a resin bed filter to collect the the iron bacteria.

Then passes through a water softener resin bed filter.

Both of which are on timers, so I have no idea where the beds are until it's too late.

You could recycle them but then you have to wait till they settle.

So the best water is half way through a cycle but when that is who knows depends on load.

So my only choice is bottled water or a RO system?

Thinking of setting up my old reef tank as fresh.

Oh ya did I mention frequent power outages and spikes.

100 km south of Ottawa but love'n it.

Allay

ps I have to run to Ottawa to shop for anything decent. (200 km round trip)

[kennyman]

I seem to be lucky as my well is quite good for my reef tank. If it was not I would definitely go RO though. The shop on #2 betwen Kingston and Gan is open again. He carries limited SW stock and supplies. hopefully its closer to you.

[Allay]

Thxs for the info on the shop.
But the run into Ottawa or Kingston gives me an excuse to get out of the house
Hum I really didn't want to get into a RO system.
The waste water would have to be pumped outside on the lawn or into a french pit.
The constant water flow would be good for the septic bed.
Any idea how much an RO system produces waste water per usable water.

We looked at it for drink water and decided bottle would be cheaper bc of maintenance, iron plays hell on filters.
I bet it would choke the membrane off in a day. 

cheers

Allay

[FishPassion]

All of my tanks run off of our well and everything seems to be going fine so far. There is always a constant thought about runoff etc in the spring but over the last several yrs no problems. At one time this year I had thought about installing and RO unit but hey if it works why mess with it. I have very hard water ph around 8 ideal for my reef tanks and cichlids.
I know the feeling living in the boonies has its drawbacks 150 km roundtrip, but I dont mind my once a week trip into the city.

[kennyman]

Another thing to concider is the amount of water needed for maintenance. I change about 1/3 of my FW tank each week compared to only 10% of my reef tank 2x a month. I feel that 1/3 is absolute minimum in a FW system. Any less and the DOC's get wild. If I had a skimmer I would probably drop to once a month in the reef tank.

If you have trouble with the replacement water for a reef imagine how much of a pain it would be for FW.

[Allay]

It's been a few years but the set up I'm using is my old marine tank set up. lol

I did buy into all that extra stuff for a while and then one day it crashed while I was away for 2 days.

Lost about every thing.

I started it up from scratch with just live rock.

At that time I talk to some old friends of mine in Florida who use fresh salt water from their beach front.

He suggested just doing large water change with a decent salt mix.

So I changed out about 15 to 20% a week with aged mix at the right salinity and temp. (used spare heaters)

As my test kits dwindled bc I always got good test results I stopped testing.

The tank ran like gang busters till I tore it down to move down here.

The salt mix was a cheaper way to go for sure by quiet a bit.

So now I'm wondering if my raw water has a stable PH of 8  what would a decent salt mix take it to?

So it looks like no plants just Cichlids or go back to salt.

As for lights all I used was 4 4ft High Output florescent lamps.

Now I using 2 4 ft lamps 40 watt GE grow lamps from Canadian Tire @ 6 hrs a day and boy do I have a algae bloom.

6 bucks a bulb sure is attractive I wonder if they would work on salt (live rock) just increase the duration to 16 hrs  a day and keep the tank depth to or less than 18 inches?
One big problem is power outages and spikes, would play hell with proper marine lighting hence the hesitation on marine.
The florescent can be repaired cheaply if it was effected but so far my other florescent haven't been.

As for the skimmer I stopped using mine bc is wasn't producing anything with all the water changes.

I guess the live rock had it under control as well.


Humm

Any thoughts?

[kennyman]

I use Red Sea salt. It works fine but to be honest the only reason is choose that salt was I liked the bag design. The bag has a handle and stands up on its own. Since My reef is only a 37gal I don't use much salt so the little bags work just fine.

My well water is PH 7.4 / dKH 15.7 / Ca 100 ppm

The saltmix buffers it to PH 8.3 / dKH 9.6 ish / Ca 380 ppm

I need to use reefbuilder to maintain Alk and Calcium additive to keep up Ca to compensate for what my corals are removing from the water. If it were a Fish only system I suspect that regular small changes of slat mix and the Fresh top-up water would maintain the water quality.

But no mattter what system you go with if you add impurities from the source they will accumulate in the tank.