Hey guys, Andrew Esquivel here back with another fishy tip and trick video for you.
Today, we're going to be discussing reverse osmosis filtration for your fish tanks.
Why did I get reverse osmosis?
Well, I have well water here at the house and the TDS, Total Dissolved Solids, is pretty
high up there.
it's around 800 parts per million which is, from what I'm told, insanely high, which I
agree, it is pretty high.
That being said, it's not impossible for creatures to live in it, as you can plainly see, they
do, but that doesn't necessarily mean we are doing as much as we can do.
Reverse osmosis, why do it?
It makes the water as pure as it can get for the most part here.
There's different levels of reverse osmosis, you can do RO, which is reverse osmosis, DI
which is di-ionization.
I have a RO system, but RO/DI does another step.
This is a three stage, you can get up to like six stage, depending on your budget, what
you are looking for, et cetera.
But let's just talk about the basics here because a lot of people, including myself,
really had no idea how this stuff worked up until now and how exactly to go about implementing
it.
What we have is a three-stage reverse osmosis system, the very basic understanding.
Just don't worry about all this, let's just explain what happens.
Water comes in from a source.
This is directly connected to my well, water comes into the system.
The system goes through a series of stages that removes certain things at different kinds
of levels.
Then, the water comes out, but there's two outlets.
One outlet is for waste water.
This is the water that's concentrated, no good, bad stuff, no-no water.
That goes into a drainage.
Then we have the good water.
This is the fresh filtered water.
This is the water you want to use, and you'll notice that it comes up pretty slow, few drips
here and there, not very fast, especially when you compare it to the bad water.
That's because there's only so much you can do.
We are taking a ton of bad water out in exchange for a little bit of good water.
Now you're probably thinking, "Hey that's pretty darn slow.
I would rather fill my fish tank up faster than that."
Well, here's the thing, it's not meant to be directly put into the fish tank.
You've got to remember, the water that comes out of this filter is pretty close to pure
water.
It's not going to be perfect, but the TDS is going to be like four or five instead of
800.
So we need to add minerals back to the water.
The plus side about this is, you can add this good water to a giant container of your own
choosing, it just has to be a clean, big container, preferably never been used for anything else,
you could use like a giant trash can made out of plastic from like Rubbermaid or any
other thing you could think of that holds water that's clean really, and let it fill
up over time because realistically, this unit it's only expected to produce about 50 gallons
per day, this unit.
Now, there are other units that do 100 gallons per day, 150 gallons per day, get what is
appropriate for you.
Considering that even though I have all these tanks, it only needs to have 20% of the water
changed weekly so I can get away with having like a 50-gallon drum of some sort where I
let the water build up to a certain point then shut it off.
At that point, I will have a giant tub of water, let's just say this is the tub, for
now.
This is the giant tub of purified water, not ready to go back into the fish because the
fish and the shrimps and all that need minerals, it's necessary.
There are different types of mineral additives you can get.
An example, and this is not the one I am going to go for, but C Chem Replenish replenishes
necessary minerals removed by RO/DI systems.
Now, these things are very concentrated.
You can get a ton of it that will last you for a very, very long time for a pretty inexpensive
amount of money.
Once again, the basic idea, bad water goes in, bad water comes out of one end, good water
comes out of one end.
The good water, you have to store somewhere.
Once the water is filled up to an amount that you can realistically use, you add minerals
back to it.
Yes, you've got good water again.
Now what?
How do you get that water out?
There's several ways of doing it.
You can do what I'm going to do, which if I could only find the darn thing, it's somewhere
around here, is a pound pump filter which is just a water pump that sits inside the
large container, connects to a hose, then you turn it on and off and it'll pump water
from the bottom out to wherever you want it.
When you're done, you can just shut it off.
There you go.
That's the basic, basic, basic understanding or RO/DI and how to implement it for your
fish tanks.
Pretty simple.
I'll be going over a more in-depth kind of explanation about how to set everything up
in future videos.
But hopefully, that gives you the most basic understanding of how it's all connected, what
it does, how it does it to a small extent, and how to get it into your fish tanks properly
and prepare it ahead of time.
Thanks for watching guys.
I hope the video was helpful.
If you liked it, please comment, rate, subscribe, share with your friends, check out my other
videos, I've got plenty of them.
As always, I'll see you next time.
Stay fishy.