A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

curing water for topping off a system

I'm sure all of us deal with the issue of having to "top off" the system regularly with additional water. Here in So Cal the water is quite hard and has chlorosamines for purity. I can knock out the chlorosamines with Vitamin C but was wondering if anyone had a technique for additional "curing" of the water to reduce the alkilinity? My system is quite small, <70 gallons and only needs about 5 to 10 gallons additional from time to time. Thanks and look forward to hearing from you...

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by TCLynx on July 18, 2011 at 11:17am

Been a bit of discussion about this lately in the pH for different crops discussion. Nate has had good luck with using an RO filter to remove carbonates and allow for tighter control of pH and nutrients.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Paul Westberg on July 18, 2011 at 2:13pm

Pardon my flaming ignorance, but what might be a RO filter?? sorry, I'm still in the learning stage

TCLynx said:

Been a bit of discussion about this lately in the pH for different crops discussion. Nate has had good luck with using an RO filter to remove carbonates and allow for tighter control of pH and nutrients.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Harold Sukhbir on July 18, 2011 at 3:57pm

Hi Paul,

It means reverse osmosis. It filters the minerals and most impurities out of the water. Please do not use Vitamin C in AP as it will crash the bacteria in your AP. The RO will bring your PH down to around 7ppm if you are above this value. You can use the search bar(top right) to search the site for any info you're curious about.(Also googling it helps you learn faster)

This is only one of the topics associated with topics of this kind http://aquaponicscommunity.com/forum/topics/ph-level-and-crop (TC was referring to)

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by RW on July 22, 2011 at 9:55pm

I have had good success using dechlorinator i bought at the local petstore and ph down.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Harold Sukhbir on July 22, 2011 at 10:26pm

Hi RW,

There can be some problems with PH down. There are a lot of products out there that will work and do what it's said to do but sometimes they won't work for Aquaponics. We've had members here that used products like the PH down containing sulphur and citric acid and both of these are not compatible with AP. I'm not saying that there aren't other products being used in soil based agriculture, aquaculture, and hydroponics that are compatible with AP use, but education on AP dynamics should be properly understood before we adopt their use.