SPS and tap water?
 

the tap water from lower mainland is pretty soft and only has 10 ppm tds

anyone has long-term success with tap water for sps tanks?

I'm sure it can be done but dont see why you would want to you will have better success with ro water in my opinion if you can afford sps you can afford a ro unit.they come up in the buy and sell often also jl has one for a bit over 100 dollars.

It is pretty amazing how clean our water is though. My RO filter was changed in November and its now just a bit beige. You see dudes online cleaning out 6 month old filters that are covered in what looks like mud. We are lucky people here in the west.

Still, the RO unit at J&L is $100, go get one.

+1

Although I have an RO system, I know of a few people that have sps and use tap water.
Anthony from seahorse fanatic is one.

Do you guys remember John's (aka lobsterboy)tank? He used water right out of the fawcet and his sps were always top notch. So, it can be done.

I think its to general of a statement because we all have different parameters in our tap water and it does vary from time to time. I think consistency is the key that's why ro is preferred. my tds is 65 out of the tap

10 PPM and 50PPM !! :surprise:

Our town has a 14 million dollar upgrade to the water plant completed this spring and my tap water runs anywhere from 300PPM to 450PPM.

Personally I can't imagine running an RO system on a 10ppm water source. Sounds pretty absurd really and a terrible waste of water even though yes you could recover and reuse the waste water elsewhere but why go through that trouble. Around these parts we use prefilters and RO to bring are source 300+ppm water down to maybe 10-20ppm. Some go further and use DI to bring it closer to zero.

If I had a water source that good I would just use a sediment filter and a carbon block to deal with chlorine and any potential changes in sediments that can sometimes occur throughout the year but that would certainly be as far as I would take it. IMO using a better safe than sorry argument here is just a little too far on the overkill scale and tipping more into the waste of time and money side of things.

I used tap water for over 5 years with no ill effects and great looking corals but in this hobby stability is #1 so if an ro filter and regular testing can prevent an issue rather cheaply is it really worth the risk. You might not know if the city flushes the lines and things change. At minimum I would test the water every time you use it.