Well water for the reef

[Slick Fork]

What's your PPM? When I was out at an acreage our well water was ~800PPM. Even with a high pressure pump for the RO unit the membrane would only get it down to about 50ppm leaving me to burn through DI ridiculously fast. Something in the water was also causing major issues in the tank, if I didn't keep up with the DI it played hell with my system like you wouldn't believe.

I had always thought of using a second membrane in order to prolong the life of the DI, but we also suffered from a shallow well pump and would run out of water pretty quickly so that would also have been a non-starter. We installed a softener and that helped a little bit.

In the end I found the water was too expensive - either trying to keep up with the DI burn or trucking RODI water in from the local water store... I ended up just shutting the tank down until we moved to town and started again.

If you can afford it, check out a whole house system. Having nice clean, non-staining water out in the country is worth the pennies if you've got them!