# Reconstitue Distilled Water



## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

When using distilled water what is the best way to reconstitute it? Equilibrium best?

How much CaCl2 with how much MgSO4 needed to raise GH by 1 dgh?

I was using CaSO4 in plaster of paris form but found it's way too messy and makes alot of stuff white in the tank. It also seems to collect in the filter.

Thanks in advance


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

Just make yourself up some GH booster; 1:3:3 MgSO4, K2SO4, CaSO4. Dose as per EI recommendations.

When you dry dose, you should be premixing your ferts with some tank or top-off water for the safety of your fish and the benefit of even distribution.

If you want to switch to CaCl2, you need to be wearing gloves and glasses to handle it. I recommend it for liquid stock solution; adding it directly to the tank without premixing and waiting may well burn the gills of your fish off. If you want to use liquid stock, you can raise your levels of Ca using equal weights of the CaCl2.2H2O to the CaSO4.~0.5H2O. Note that CaSO4 will impact GH more because of the SO4, but your goal should be correct calcium rather than the imperfect reflection of combined Mg/Ca/SO4 that GH testing offers.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

I will be using CaCl2 as per the other thread. It will be Dry-z-air form unless I find it elsewhere in liquid. Do I still go by the 1:3:3 MgSO4, K2SO4,CaCl2? And i'm more working to get the water right shrimp as opposed to plants. Is the EI going to work the same? For example my cherries were dying off with my tap until I switched to using part Equilibrium, part MgSO4, plaster of paris and baking soda for KH. All that in distilled water. Now they are constantly berried. Gearing towards trying the CRS.

I'd like to get the GH, KH and pH right. In my other tanks I'm more just looking to get the GH were it's supposed to be instead of zero.


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

Ya, do the same 1:3:3 ratio. Compensate by adding an extra 9-10% Dri-Z-Air because of impurities.

RCS are hard to kill. I've dosed CaCl2 and the equivalent of GH booster in my own mixing with spawning apistos.

GH is just a reflection of ca/mg/so4 for the most part. Make sure those 3 things are sufficiently present and you won't need to think of it in terms of GH anymore. I don't even worry about SO4 for that matter; enough comes along with the SO4-bound micros (not to mention MgSO4) and food.

Low KH is a great thing. I get better out of my stock for it. Push it to 0 if you can; consistent KH is key, not pH buffering. We swing pH up and down all day via CO2 and it's not a problem for fauna unless the levels go into toxic ranges.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

I know RCS are hard to kill but they still didn't like my tap water. It has high pH, very high KH and no GH. Kind of all over the place. 

I just think of it terms of GH for testing purposes I guess. 

I can have 0 KH with the distilled but from everything I've read I need to have some KH. My distilled water tanks aren't really planted. Just a couple low light no CO2 plants. Don't use ferts in them either.


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

GH for testing purposes is great. So long as you put it in the psychological compartment as a test for a number of nutrients, you've got things down. IMO 50ppm GH is about all you need if it's done right, but padding is always nice.

Now as for no/low (can never get rid of it all really) KH systems...

Take a stroll over to thebarrreport.com and ask around about KH; there's a great thread going on about how people reconstitute their RO going on. Ask Tom if you like about his <0.5 KH experiences or look up the threads where he talks about it. Look over some apisto spawning logs on thekrib archive; KH won't hang around at the 5.5pH range that was being used at the time.

I used to think KH was vital, now I can't say there's any reason for it outside of perhaps osmotic pressure in African rift lake and similar fish. Even then I can't say it's necessary, just that I would speculate towards it being needed. Outside of that, I simply haven't found a reason that carbon in the form of CO3 needs to be there with plants or soft water fish. Don't get me wrong, the calcium and magnesium that usually comes in through CaCO3 and MgCO3; just not the CO3.

I'd encourage you to do research on the side that says it isn't necessary. Do it for everything in this hobby, compare both sides where you can. There are so many myths have been dispelled, but the debunking hasn't gotten wide circulation yet. There was a time not so long ago when, "high PO4 causes algae" was a fact.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

I will for sure do some reading. Learn something new every time I read up about running my tanks. 

I guess I'm just more worried about my shrimp since I'd like them to continue to reproduce and I might as well make the parameters to what has worked well for others. 

As for my other fish tanks I don't really bother with KH since like I said out of my tap it's just amazingly high. They seem to be fine with it that way. Although who knows, maybe they'd be happier with it at a more reasonable level. I just don't want to start messing around with it. It's alot easier to raise something then it is to lower it I find.


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

People worry about hardness in practice way too much IMO. 99% of the tap water out there that is fit for humans can be made perfect for plants and ideal for any moderate to softer water fish with 25-75% RO/DI, if it even needs that. Exceptions would be spawning the super soft water fish, or keeping the rarest live-caught amazonian dwarfs (you won't just end up with them by accident), in which case you've already got your water parameter research cut out for you.

In short, if you want an easy tank you don't have to do the reading right now. Use some tap to get a satisfying KH if you like, you'll be saving money on big tanks when you blend more generously with tap anyhow.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

On my big tanks I use straight tap. I only started using the distilled when I couldn't keep the RCS alive. And even then I only use distilled because it's such a small tank. Like you said I don't want to do more work than I need to.


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## barbarossa4122 (Dec 31, 2009)

Philosophos said:


> Just make yourself up some GH booster; 1:3:3 MgSO4, K2SO4, CaSO4. Dose as per EI recommendations.


Great idea.I have plenty of MgSO4, K2SO4 and CaSO4 so, I will not be buying GH booster anytime soon.
Oh, I forgot , I have a scale now.


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## Elohim_Meth (Nov 4, 2007)

Philosophos said:


> Note that CaSO4 will impact GH more because of the SO4, but your goal should be correct calcium rather than the imperfect reflection of combined Mg/Ca/SO4 that GH testing offers.


It sounds surprisingly to me, that SO4 impacts GH-test reading, so i just take an experiment. I added some K2SO4 to distilled water and check GH. The test showed zero (it was Tetratest)... 
There was some precipitation, so the solution was saturated.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

It's not the SO4 as far as I know. GH is a test of Mg and Ca. We just use what is easiest to mix to get the Ca and Mg.


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## Elohim_Meth (Nov 4, 2007)

timbruun said:


> It's not the SO4 as far as I know. GH is a test of Mg and Ca.


I always believed so, but Philosophos wrote - if I understood him right - that SO4 increase GH too, that's because I wanted to check if it really does.


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

No, SO4 doesn't make GH go up; the relation is indirect. I should've been more articulate... and I goofed a little.

If you subtract KH from GH then work out the mols, you can ballpark the SO4 you're getting through tap. This of course presumes you aren't in an area with a lot of N or P in the drinking water. It's not that the SO4 increases the GH, but rather that GH is an imperfect representation.

In regards to CaSO4 adding more because of the sulfate, I was referring to atomic mass and the difference in ratio of Ca:SO4/Cl2 in the two compounds. The screw-up would be that I thought CaSO4 would contain more calcium because of the SO4, but the hydration form you buy will impact things way more. When you buy ferts, you are not just getting CaCl2 or CaSO4, you are usually getting some ._n_H2O along with it. Either way, it's about having enough calcium, not about hitting some target on a GH test kit within a degree or two. You're fine at 2-12GH in the column and probably higher so long as there's enough of each nutrient. Dosing 4-5 with EI to a max of 8-10 and enough in the column that it won't all be used up under the highest light allows for remarkably stable parameters.


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## Elohim_Meth (Nov 4, 2007)

Philosophos said:


> It's not that the SO4 increases the GH, but rather that GH is an imperfect representation.


I'm still a little confused. Why GH is an imperfect representation? Theoretically, GH represents the sum of Ca and Mg ions. I add in 100 liters of RO water 7.1 g of MgSO4 and 14.1 g of CaSO4*0.5H2O that is 7 ppm of Mg and 39 ppm of Ca. Using formula GH=(Mg*4,1+Ca*2,5)/17,86 i calculate GH and it must be 7. Then i use the test and it shows GH=7. All is correct, i think...


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

GH is a representation of all minerals in the water. Even with obscenely high dosing though, odds are you aren't going to be adding even half a degree of GH from everything besides Ca++ or Mg++ cations. Your test kit results will be altered slightly though, as the EDTA in test kits will chelate those cations.

The real issue is that GH testing doesn't differentiate from Ca and Mg, so it isn't reliable for determining if there's enough Mg (and once in a while Ca) in your tap. If you already know the composition and weight of what you're adding, then you don't need to test GH. It becomes a useless measurement in terms of daily use. As a primary diagnostic it can be handy though; in 99.9% of cases within North America, a GH of 50ppm is going to mean that you've got enough calcium.

What I'm referring to with the SO4 is similar to how GH measures both Ca and Mg at the same time, but it's one step removed. Lets say you have 20ppm KH and 30ppm GH (and a test kit accurate enough to measure this) you know that there is 10ppm of Ca that is not related to CaCO3 because of this. Now, unless you live near water that gets exposed to some abnormal mineral deposits or lots of farm runoff, you're probably not getting calcium into your tap water from calcium/magniesium phosphate/nitrate. So then, once you've got that worked out it's most likely that any non-carbonate GH came from a SO4 related compound. After that it's a matter of doing the math to calculate the related quantity of SO4 to 10ppm of GH. This can be done in a few ways, and requires a little different math depending on whether your test kit is giving you results as atomic ratio or getting sloppy and trying to guess at atomic mass. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to put together my own test kits.

Your math is right. Of course if you want an even number/specific ppm, you can always just do the molar mass of the compound divided by the molar mass of the nutrient, then multiply by the desired ppm. From there just multiply by the number of liters you want to dose.


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## Philosophos (Mar 1, 2009)

It turns out I have a little more time on my hands than I thought today.

If you know the quantity of EDTA being used in the kit, multiply its concentration in the test by 0.6574 to get ppm of SO4.

If you're not sure what's going on in the head of the manufacturer (most likely what's going to happen), you can presume mg/L of SO4 is somewhere between 25.3% and 41.7% that of the GH.


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## Elohim_Meth (Nov 4, 2007)

Philosophos said:


> If you already know the composition and weight of what you're adding, then you don't need to test GH. It becomes a useless measurement in terms of daily use.


Agree. I use re-mineralized RO water for water changes and GH test is for me more like the way to validate my calculations. I only do the test when my Ca and Mg dosing is altered by some reason.


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## Diana K (Dec 20, 2007)

I also have found that KH and pH are lower in importance, but having the minerals in the water that are needed by plants, fish and shrimp is very important. Make sure the GH (and its components) are in the right range. 

I have several tanks with almost unreadable KH. The pH is still stable (very low), the GH is fine (about 4-5 degrees) and fish and plants are fine. 

I worry about the nitrifying bacteria, though. They seem not to do so well at such low pH. Still, the ammonia and nitrite are 0 in these tanks, and there is some nitrate that I can trace to fish food (when I skip dosing KNO3 there is still nitrate), so the bacteria cannot be all dead.


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

Ok. I've finally had time to try this out. I did this in a 5 US gallon jug but mixed everything seperatly in a small glass and added them seperatly. 

Sorry I'm using volume instead of weight. Haven't been able to get a scale yet, but for what I need to do volume is fine. 

So what I've come up with is 0.75 tsp of Dry-Z-Air which is CaCl2 and 0.75 tsp of epsom salt which is MgSO4. This will bring my GH up to 12 dgh. Give or take 1 dgh I find. 

I then add 2.5 tsp of baking soda. This will bring my KH up to 8 dkh give or take also.

Keep in mind I'm using distilled water. I do also add a very small pinch of KH2PO4 and K2SO4 since that's what was mentioned to do also. In fertilator it's almost nothing to add for 5 US gallons.

I assume that if I wanted to do a 55 gallon tank with the same GH I would just multiply the amount by 11. So I'd be adding 8.25 tsp of each. Right?


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## timbruun (Feb 23, 2010)

Oops. Sorry. 1 tsp baking soda for KH of 8


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