The Almost Complete Guide For Newbies.

[JaminRat]

Can I use tap water in my reef tank?
-I've seen people do it, but it's resulted in many crashes from algae blooms etc. The preferred water source to use is R/O water or Reverse Osmosis water which contains no heavy metals. For a tank the size of a 10-20 gallon you can buy the water from the store or you can buy an R/O unit which filters out tap water and produces R/O water.

A little more info on water. There are other sources of water available such de-ionised and distilled which are also acceptable but the points to remember with these are.

Distilled water can be bought at supermarkets but often has things added so be sure to check the label of the bottle.

De-ionised (DI) water is actually much more thorough way of filtering water giving less total dissolved solutes (TDS) per million parts of water (ppm). Another plus for this system is together with generating no waste water, as with RO, much larger quantities can be produced in a short space of time. For example an average RO system will produce 50 gallons per day (GPD) whereas the DI system I use will produce 160 gallons per hour.
The downside of this system is that it is more expensive than RO water with the cartridges being much more expensive (the cartridge I use is £120) and only good for roughly 6 months use. The other downside is that de-ionisation will leach some contaminants such as silicate prior to the filter indicating that it requires replacement.

The recommended system is a system which incorporates RO and DI.
Hope this info is useful for you.

 

[andywg]

Someone is trying to do this in the FW section and I pointed out there that too much of the hobby is down to individual points and the nature of the fish/aquarist to lend itself easily to a single post guide for all basics.

This is even more so in the SW side of the hobby. As much as I applaud the efforts to condense the knowledge and make it accessible, one can never do so without losing a large amount of accuracy which becomes very important in marine fishkeeping.

I believe a far better way of doing this would be a page with a number of the more basic questions that are often asked and links to the answers as in depth posts addressing that issue.

For example

As mentioned, deep sand beds are something that are very scarcely discussed. They were originally designed with a plenum (void area) underneath the bed to aid in operation. This was found to have a benefit. What is often not mentioned is that this was on sand beds that were in the multiples of feet deep. There is no likelihood of having such a thing in the home aquarium.

People started taking more interest in the plenum than the bed itself. Beds that are not deep enough tend to become problems, hence the occasionally used mantra that a sand bed should be less than an inch or more than 6. Rob Fenner has a great page on DSB on his WetWebMedia site.

Trying to get the above (and more) information into a concise intro thread just wouldn't work well and would not do each subject the justice it deserves. I, again, applaud the effort, but do not think that such a thread can work by containing the necessary information to be accurate, while still readable by the casual researcher looking for quick answers on a couple of points.