Using R/O Water for Oscar Tank

Hi All,

Since adding a marine tank (blasphemy I know!) to the home, we now have an RO system for drinking water, with an added DI stage for the marine tank water.

We would like to try and switch over to the RO water from our regular Seachem Prime-treated tap water. I have purchased Seachem Equilibrium to re-mineralize for our planted tank's needs (Community of smaller fish like Mollies, Giant Danios, Various Tetras and a boatload of plants).

However we also have a tank with 1 adult and 2 juvenile Oscars (with 2 plecos and a sneaky uncatchable Kribensis). No plants we care about in this one (for obvious reasons). Do we need to add anything additional to the RO water for this tank as well?

Would Equilibrium be enough for the planted tank?

Any advice would be welcome

Thank you

 

I would rather use your waste water for the tropical tanks.

 

Deleting

 

What Barry said - essentially the the waste water exitng the RO. I usually just add Prime and use this in my freshwater tanks - no issues

 

With RO, you'd have to use something to buffer your KH as well - Seachem alkaline buffer for instance.

 

I am going to bump this one up as I have had an algae outbreak in 4 different freshwater tanks over the last week. One is green-spot and the other two are black-hair algae.

I have tested for phosphates and they are around 2ppm. So I tested my tapwater - exactly the same results. I tried to check our water report, but it doesn't seem like they test phosphates - I suppose because it isn't really harmful to humans or matter all that much. (Source: http://www.reservoir.co.za/municipalities/ekurhuleni/Ekurhuleni_Jun2020.pdf)

I do a 50% waterchange in every freshwater tank once a week. Tapwater treated with Seachem Prime.

I am struggling to understand why using the RO wastewater would be a good idea. Doesn't this contain all the crap that my RO system took out so we don't drink it (I have an RO system for the kitchen tap with a split DI stage for my marine tank). So if I test the waste water, won't that have the same amount of phosphates and nitrates that I already deal with in the tap water?

I have purchased a bottle of Seachem Replenish and also Seachem Equilibrium. I can get some Alkaline buffer as recommended as well.

I am trying to figure out a long term plan for the algae issues and don't know much about chemistry and completely lost. From what I read online, phosphates of 2ppm could be the source of my problems but it's not sure.

All my tanks are low-tech with a few live plants in them, with exception of my heavily planted tank which has no visible algae but it could be that it just has no chance there competing with all the plants. I use Seachem Matrix as filter media in all the tanks.

I have included here a picture of my my tanks for reference.






https://ibb.co/BzFm8k4
https://ibb.co/dMG62T0
https://ibb.co/w6t8VK0
https://ibb.co/8rF1rg5

(It seems images don't work)

 

If you don't have the di resin on your ro. You won't get the best tds results. A kh buffer won't help much you need to re miniralize the clean ro water to make up for what you striped out. Where your wastw water will have all of that in. If you strip your tanks of po4 and have no3 then you will have a Un balaced tank as you need po4 and no3 to eliminate both as they work hand in hand Google Redfield ratio. The plant guys will help more algea wise. But simply lowering light cycles will affect your po4. But having lots of algea and testing 0 po4 does not mean it's non existing it means the algea is using up the po4 quicker than you can test.