RO (reverse osmosis) units

[t2000kw]

If I need to go to an RO unit to manage discus with my tap water, I'd like to know a few things. Feel free to answer only part of this post at a time to keep it simple if you'd like.

Most of the RO units I've priced are capable of producing 25-75 gallons per day.

Doing a water change in a 55 gallon tank would require say 20-30 gallons.

Now, doing the math, with the usual supplied storage tank of 5-10 gallons, you can't get that much at once from the system. Once the storage tank is filled, no more will be produced until some is taken from the tank.

So, regardless of how many gallons per day an RO unit is rated, it seems that I would have to find another way to store water by draining the storage tank every so often into another container, which is not very convenient at all.

How do you all take care of this?

I don't really want to trust a float valve to do that job. I don't trust them to shut off perfectly every time.

So, do you draw 4 or so gallons of water every few hours into a storage container and when you have enough to use, do the water change?

Or can you get a storage tank that holds a lot more water at a time?

Are these storage tanks the same as the ones used to store well water from a well pump? If so, one could buy one of those and hook it up in the basement to store a lot more water.

Donald Hellen

[RyanH]

I use 3 55 gallon food grade barrels to store my water. I got mine from a 7-UP bottling plant near my old house. I think I paid $5 apiece for them.

I use them for both RO and and tap water storage. This way I can have my water aerated, aged, heated and ready to go when I'm ready to do water changes.

I drain my tanks using python syphon hoses and refill them from the barrels with a water pump and clear 3/4" hose. Do NOT use garden hose.

BTW, a good auto shut off is still a great idea.

I hope I answered your questions. :p

-Ryan

[lhforbes12]

Donald,
Look on eBay for your RO unit. Some even sell aquarium ready units. You don't need to use the storage tank that comes with the unit, any storage tank works as long as it's large enough and fish safe. 25 gpd is an awfully small unit, I would go with a 100 gpd, they are rated for gpd under perfect conditions, which almost no one has (In water @ 77F, pressure 60 psi), anything else will give you less water.
The question I must ask though is; why do you feel you need an RO unit?

Larry

[t2000kw]

I use them for both RO and and tap water storage. This way I can have my water aerated, aged, heated and ready to go when I'm ready to do water changes.

I drain my tanks using python syphon hoses and refill them from the barrels with a water pump and clear 3/4" hose. Do NOT use garden hose.


I can get food grade containers locally, but not that cheaply. I have one, actually, that I use for making wine once a year (30 gallon container).

I hadn't given any thought to heating the water changed out but it shold have occurred to me. We're talking warm water fish, not like most of those I have now. Thanks for mentioning that.

What I would probably do is put a container in the basement, install a small pump and a heater in it, and periodically turn on a valve to send water to the container.

This will take a lot more work ahead of time, but would need to be done. At least, something would need to be done to heat the water I store, regardless of how I choose to store it.

[RandalB]

Invest in a set of test kits (pH, gH and kH for sure, but nitrate, nitrite and ammonia will also be useful) and test your water before you invest in a RO unit. Chances are you won't need one...

Post the results here and we can help you out.

Watch the Ebay RO stuff if you decide to buy. Lots of Fly by night outfits slinging crap on ebay....

HTH,
RandalB

[t2000kw]

The question I must ask though is; why do you feel you need an RO unit?

Larry

Not sure I will need one. If I do, it will be a reason to put off getting discus for quite a while. It's one thing to buy another aquarium, stand, hood, etc. (I might make my own stand as I've found a 55 gal for $30 but no stand or hood). It's another to add an extra $100 to $200 for an RO unit.

I would eventually like to have one to strip out some of the stuff the city puts in our water, flouride for example.

Looking over the finances, it would be too much of a stretch to buy an RO unit at this time.

However, the concern I have is that my city water has a pH of about 7.4+ (varies a bit, and the reading depends on the brand of test kit somewhat).

I can drop it down by other means. I've done it before with sodium bicarbonate and it stablizes quickly.

I have a GH of 18 or so and a KH of less than 4. Strange, of course. Adding the bicarb adds KH, which I need, without adding to the GH, and it drops the pH also. I might choose to do this instead.

Any thoughts?

(I have a similar post on pH, KH, and GH and about starting a discus tank in another thread).

[t2000kw]

Invest in a set of test kits (pH, gH and kH for sure, but nitrate, nitrite and ammonia will also be useful) and test your water before you invest in a RO unit. Chances are you won't need one...

Post the results here and we can help you out.



I don't have the discus yet, but here's what I can tell you at this point, based on our planted tanks.

pH = 7.4+
GH = 22, according to my wife (I thought it was about 18)
KH = 2 to 5
nitrate, nitrite, and ammonia not detectable.

We have a Walstad planted tank so we have no problem with these last three items. WIth our planted tanks, they cycled virtually instantly. With goldfish in the 100 gallon, we almost immediately had the ammonia at barely detectable levels with 3 days, nitrates were never a problem, either. We had a small amount of nitrites for a few days or so then they went away. We credit the plants with the success of the tank. We also transferred filter media from another tank to seed the bacteria into the new tank (the then newly set up 100 gallon planted tank).

Hope this helps, and thanks for helping me learn about this, an area I'm not too familiar with.

Donald

[t2000kw]

Additional information . . .

I should mention that this will be a planted discus tank, a "Walstad" type tank, low tech, low light, no CO2.

I guess what I'm most concerned with is not nitrates, nitrites, or ammonia, since we can get that under control before the discus would be bought by using goldfish to get the tank started, but the pH being so high straight from the tap.

Since an RO unit is now out of the question anyway due to finances, I would like to know how to address this, unless the high pH is actually workable.

If that is the case, how would I adjust the discus from whatever water they were in (someone in our aquatic plant society is selling some mated pairs for $100 per pair) to my water?

Thanks again.

Donald

[jdh21cali]

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Thank you,
The Simplydiscus.com team

[AADiscus]

Donald, why worry about your PH? Unless you are breeding and it doesn't sound like you are. Our tap comes out at 7.4+- We age our water in water storage barrels. Some use the 30 gal trash cans you can buy at Wal-mart, etc. The only tanks that get RO is our breeders and even then we don't adjust PH. If you do get an RO you will waste 3-4 gals per 1 gal your RO makes. Our RO unit is hooked up with the waste line going to the big aged tap water tubes to use in the grow out tanks so that we are not wasting that water.

If you are new to Discus I would suggest starting out with a BB tank and not planted. But do alot of reading the planted section here on Simply. There is alot that do have very pretty planted tanks with Discus.

[RandalB]

7.4 is fine for discus and kH of 4 is fine too if you keep up with the w/c's. Hope the rest of that 22 gH is Phosphates and you're off to the races in your planted tank....

I kept discus in a planted tank at 7.8 for years with no problems.....

RandalB

[yeomans]

7.4 is a great ph for discus as long as it is keep steady, don't be so concerned about lowering your ph. If you are interested only in an r.o machine for lowering ph or getting ridd of chlorine you might be barking up the wrong tree.
Get ahold of a barrell and age your water. If you are not interested in breeding or are not doing it at this moment, you don't need the r.o. In the future when you get breeding you might need one, but that only gives you time to save up for a deccent unit.
I have a small unit only 24gpd a day, I mix tap water and r.o water in a 60 gallon plastic barrell which is aerated and agged 24 hours. You can't use just pure r.o water because it is stripped of everything, so it needs to be mixed with regular tap water to achive the right parameters, a barrell is perfect for this.

[t2000kw]

I see several posts about aging the water.

What purpose does this serve for the discus tank?

How long do you need to age the water?

[t2000kw]

7.4 is fine for discus and kH of 4 is fine too if you keep up with the w/c's. Hope the rest of that 22 gH is Phosphates and you're off to the races in your planted tank....

I kept discus in a planted tank at 7.8 for years with no problems.....

RandalB

I see that you and Yeomans have had success at higher than my water's pH. I didn't think that high of a pH would work, but I did have an idea that ultimate pH levels (within reason, of course) weren't as important as is the consistency. I've read that with neon tetras, which some people seem to have problems keeping alive, going up is OK but down is much more of a shock. Might this be the same with discus?

Breeding is one of my goals, but not necessarily right away. I can work towards that in time, so a lower pH is not some thing I need to try right away.


I posted some of this in another thread, but I'm getting more activity here, so here goes . . .

One of my questions is how to adapt newly arrived discus to my water. How can I go about this, and over how long a time period should I do it? These will travel probably 2 hours in my car in a bucket or two (2 mated pairs). I can keep them at a comfortable temperature by using a power inverter to power a submersible aquarium heater put down inside the bucket. But since there is a need to avoid some sort of pH shock, how do I minimize that?

[t2000kw]

7.4 is fine for discus and kH of 4 is fine too if you keep up with the w/c's. Hope the rest of that 22 gH is Phosphates and you're off to the races in your planted tank....

I kept discus in a planted tank at 7.8 for years with no problems.....

RandalB

I just realized it is you who I wanted to get in touch with about making my own RO unit. I looked over your post about putting one together and thought it was educational, but I didn't learn all I wanted to about RO filtration and how the parts go together. The prefilters and postfilters would be easy, I think, but the main part, the RO membrane filter part, I still have some questions on.

Making or buying one right away is no longer a hot issue at this time because of yours and Yeoman's advice about using the water I have now, so this post is for future reference.

However, for health reasons and for eventual breeding purposes I am interested in putting together my own RO unit, but only if it is more cost effective than buying a ready made one. If I can learn enough about it, I could put one together over time.

If the difference in cost is not much, I would probably go with the ready made ones, but change some of the fittings like in your post about putting one together.

If it's cost effectove to build your own, is there a place where I could buy the various parts? I've seen the basic household water filter housings (with larger threaded openings than needed) for a little over $10 at a local farm supply store. I don't know where to buy the housings for the RO membrane or how to go about routing the different hoses to and from the membrane housing. I also don't quite understand how the thing will flush itself, or is that a manual thing?

There's also supposed to be a pump of sorts that can be added to make an RO unit close to a zero waste unit so it doesn't use several gallons of waste water to produce one gallon of RO water.

I'd want to make sure that everything was standard and not proprietary so I didn't have to buy from one manufacturer. I have wondered if some of those used special parts that only could be purchased for that brand.

[gators111]

I looked into making my own RO unit, but by the time you buy all the parts, you are about at the same cost as some of the manufacturers. I ended up buying mine from airwaterice and have no complaints, plus it makes great drinking water too.

As far as aging water goes, it is a good rule of thumb to age it 24hrs. The reason for aging is to off gas any CO2 to stabilize the pH, heating up the water to match your tank's temp, and in the case of RO to reconstitute the water with RO Right or other mineral supplement.

[t2000kw]

I looked into making my own RO unit, but by the time you buy all the parts, you are about at the same cost as some of the manufacturers. I ended up buying mine from airwaterice and have no complaints, plus it makes great drinking water too.

As far as aging water goes, it is a good rule of thumb to age it 24hrs. The reason for aging is to off gas any CO2 to stabilize the pH, heating up the water to match your tank's temp, and in the case of RO to reconstitute the water with RO Right or other mineral supplement.

Thanks for the explanation on aging water.

If I buy one ready made (and I suspected that they would be similar in price to home built units), I would add the better fittings that are used in the pictures somewhere else in this forum. I forget what they are called, but they allow the tubing to be disconnected for maintenance without a wrench like compression fittings require. They are a sort of push-in fitting.

[t2000kw]

I looked into making my own RO unit, but by the time you buy all the parts, you are about at the same cost as some of the manufacturers. I ended up buying mine from airwaterice and have no complaints, plus it makes great drinking water too.

As far as aging water goes, it is a good rule of thumb to age it 24hrs. The reason for aging is to off gas any CO2 to stabilize the pH, heating up the water to match your tank's temp, and in the case of RO to reconstitute the water with RO Right or other mineral supplement.

Thanks for the explanation on aging water.

If I buy one ready made (and I suspected that they would be similar in price to home built units), I would add the better fittings that are used in the pictures somewhere else in this forum. I forget what they are called, but they allow the tubing to be disconnected for maintenance without a wrench like compression fittings require. They are a sort of push-in fitting.

[gators111]

Mine has the quick disconnect fittings. I know there is a name brand for them, but I can't remember it either.

[lhforbes12]

They are called "John Guest" fittings