What did people use before ro/di water???

According to my local water report, there is nothing in my tap water that WOULD NOT harm fish or coral. Arsenic, flouride, lead, copper....the list goes on.

 

Alot of places inject ammonia into the water supply. I know several plants inject sulfuric acid, an anti-scalent, ammonia, sodium hydroxide, sodium hypochlorite, zinc orthophosphate, and a couple others i can't remember. Just scary to think about (hasn't stopped me from drinking it, just wouldn't want to live in it).

 

LOL I have fish as old as you and until my son screwed up my tank in Va I had several SPS colonies that old also .

 

Necessity is the Mother of Invention

Ah, yes... the "good ol' days". lol

Actually, when I set up my first saltwater aquarium, it was taboo to stock or maintain your system in a manner that would necessitate water changes, unless you lived by the shore. Little was known then about the minerals and heavy metals found in some tap water systems, and the inability of some aquariums with fresh-mixed SW to sustain life was falsely attributed to an instability in the artificial salt. As one expert wrote, "...you may be removing dirty but otherwise healthy water, and replacing it with pure poison".

At the same time, stardard fluorescent lighting was brand-new technology, and the only filter actually designed for SW was the UGF, another newly-released invention. And yes, any info you could find about introducing a coral into your aquarium gave great detail on how to kill it and cure the skeleton for decoration, but I doubt water quality was the only issue.

I'm not too sure when RO/DI got it's start, but after the discovery of the impurities in tap water, other filtration methods were developed which typically involved large amounts of carbon.

 

did he learn his lesson

 

There is a big difference between the minimum required to get by and what is optimal to use. Tap water IMO is the former and RO/DI is the latter. Some people use tap water just fine, it has also crashed other people's tanks in other cases, or been the source of years of algae issues and other headaches. Tap water is so variable, even over the course of a few months, your tap water's composition could change dramatically.

It's a risk/reward decision, RO/DI units are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, and good water quality is probably #1 on the list of requirements for reef keeping. You can decide if it's worth trying to get by with the minimum requirements.

 

I've thought about filling up my bath with RODI and having the cleanest bubble bath ever... sry off topic.
corals are made of nearly entirely water... I would think they would want the best.
I had an old reef tank where i used a mix between conditioned/aged tap and RODI from LFS and always had red algae on my sand. i kept hardy corals and the lived but did not grow and i was running carbon bags in my sump all the time.
Since my new setup i have invested in a RODI unit and have never allowed a drop of tap into my tank and now my corals are growing to the point where i am always having to frag and they look much better.

 

I bought my first RO system in the early 90's. Before that I used deep well water and fought algae blooms and water quality issues constantly, but we didn't know any better at the time.
When my water utility switched from unchlorinated well water to treated canal water is when my tanks really went to heck and I bought my first RO system. The turnaround was amazing and my tanks really took off. A 15 GPD RO with a 110 freshwater, 180 FOWLR, 90 and 20 saltwater reefs was a stretch though, it made water nonstop until I bought a 75 GPD membrane and restrictor.

 

LOL