I'd like to share what I have learned about water and the importance of it's quality and how it relayted to basic health.
Below you can see a pic of one of my reef tanks. It is loaded with about 8k worth of some of the most amazing coral you'll ever see.The most important aspect of keeping a reef tank healthy is maintaining PERFECT water quality from salinity(specific gravity) to maintainig proper levels of nitrates, nitrites, ammonia,phosphate, alkalinity,PH etc.. etc..
In essence reef building requires you to become a sort of kitchen chemist/water quality expert.
In the past I used to think that Tap water must be safe..well it is..to a 100lb plus animal. The concentrations of chemicals from chlorine to pesticides is reportedly within "safe" limits for human and most animal consumption. But when you get down to smaller and smaller animals the effects are much more noticable and in marine ecosystems they are quite disasterous.
Even filter water has levels of pesticides ,lead, copper etc.. In fact so much so that if I were to use filtered tap water the tabnk below withing several days would become overrun with macroalgeas due to the trace levels of pesticides as well as high levels of nitrate . Most invertabrates,fish and coral housed in the type of water become ill and die, some larger invertibrates will have there calcium in there shell dissolve due to pH levels etc..As for the corals..they will literally melt if exposed to this type of water for any leangth of time.
Now with all this in mind I do not see how tap water can be generally deemed safe for small animals or even humans. I have seen what it can do to a enclosed complex ecosystem and I really hate to think what it does to our reptiles overall health. I picked up a Reverse Osmosis unit off of ebay for less that 100.00 and we use it for all our cooking drinking and of course for the reptiles. No longer do I see a white chemical ring form in waterbowls (evaporation concentrates these chemicalls even further)my animals seem healthier and as for my wife and I , we do seem to feel better.

In conclusion I'd like to say that water is the most important ingredient to life..don't take it's quality for granted!! At your local hardware stores they sell home water test kits..buy one you'll be disgusted to what your drinking..even if using a good quality filter. Mine after the filter had high levels of lead, copper , and pesticides...

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Justin Mitcham
ExtremeHogs.com

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