Is it worth it to use a RO system

opaleski

opaleski
Jun 9, 2006
59
0
0
Hills of Florida
I live in Florida where the water is high in ph and very hard. I currently have two tanks, one is a 110 gal and the other is a 75 gal. I have Angels in the 110 gal tank and African's in the 75 gal. All fish seem to be doing fine-though no breeding is going on which is fine with me. I am setting up two other tanks, a 375 gal for Africans and a 350 gal for an Angel-community tank. Would you go to a RO system if you were me and why?
 
i too live in florida and i use an RO system on most of my tanks except my cichilds due to the fact that they like harder water. I dont have angels so i wouldnt know.

Just my two cents.
 
what is your pH? most angels are tank bred nowadays and are not picky about the pH.
 
A ph of 8.3 is within the range of a typical african cichlid aquarium. Keep in mind the african lakes tend to have relativly high hardness and ph. Using RO water in this case would almost be counterproductive since you will have to add in a fair amount of minerals to buffer the ph up to about 8.0 anyway.

If I'm thinking right the ideal ph for angelfish is something like 6.9 however. As you say you don't need them to be breeding keeping them in a ph of 8.3 should be fine.

To be honest unless you want to keep and breed discus I wouldn't buy into a RO water system for your aquariums.
 
So you don't use the RO on your African tank?

yeah, i dont. But personally i wouldnt. The only reason that i have an RO system is because my brother had an Arrowana and wanted it to have prestine water condition.
 
Cichlid's like harder water with a higher PH. The waters they come from have many salts and minerals in them. If you are not using RO now and everything is going fine I would not add an RO system. The only thing I use RO water for is my SW tank.
 
Find out what pH and hardness they are kept in at the petstore and see if the fish there look healthy.
 
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