water storage

[gon4x4n]

Well as I spend more time researching this hobby I find out I'm doing more and more wrong!! I always just mixed my water and salt minutes before using it. Now that I have been researching RO/DI units I find out that the majority have some sort of container that there water is mixed a long time in advance.

Anyway I want to start having it mixed well before I need it but I have a few questions:

-What do you store your RO/DI water in? I read that It has to be a food safe container or you can leach stuff back into your water.

-That having been said is it worth buying a container with cover and autoshutoff valve and float for around $100?

-Do you have a powerhead and heater in the container to keep it from being stail?

-How long can that water stay in the container before it has to be used? Or can you keep a constant 40 gallons in there and let the RO/DI unit keep replentishing what I take out for water changes?

Thanks alot!

 

[JohnD]

4x4-

I have a Rubbermaid foodsafe can and lid. I also bought the dolly. IMHO the dolly was the smartest purchase - I wheel the can to the sink to make water and back to the tanks to do water changes.

I do not have the SKU for the Rubbermaid, but I bought the can and dolly from Office Depot online. About $50. The next week I got smart and bought the dolly from Home Depot. About $35. If you do a search on this board, there is a post from around March or April of this year that lists the SKUs.

I have a 50 GPD RO unit and I do not have the auto shutoff that you talk about. I am the auto shutoff. No accidents yet.

You go to all of the trouble to purchase a multi-stage RO unit for umpteen dollars, you may as well store the water in a clean, safe container. Why have recyced plastics leach into the water? That doesn't make sense in my book.

I run a powerhead 24/7, but I only put the heater in the rubbermaid can the day before I need the water.

I use IO and most of the time I have a residue from mixing the salt with the RO water. After I use the mixed saltwater, I usually clean out the residue before making another batch of RO water.

HTH

 

[Kitta]

JohnD
How can one tell if a container is foodsafe?
I bought a Rubbermaid container for my water storage and I want to find out if it's safe.
And what is SKU?

 

[esmithiii]

SKU is Stock Keeping Unit, or in other words the part number of the manufacturer or the number on the UPC barcode on the product that uniquely identifies the product.

As for food safe, if the packaging for the container does not say food safe then it is probably not food-safe. BTW, I think the food-safe thing is a bunch of bunk. If you are cheap like me you will use anything that has never had anything else in it. I use 5gal plastic gasoline containers that have never been used for anything else (no gasoline ever!) I also went to a water store (they sell bottled water for those drinking water dispensers and I bought several 5 gal plastic bottles and some reusable caps.

E

 

[esmithiii]

Also, forgot to mention... What do you mean by "Well in advance?" I only wait a couple of hours after mixing the salt and water. I use a powerhead to aerate the water and a heater to bring it up to the same temp as the main tank. I have never had any problems.

E

 

[IBJJ]

I use empty 5 gal water cooler jugs. The clear type by Crystal or Zephyr Hills that you'd see in an office.

 

[gon4x4n]

Thanks everyone for your input! the dolly Idea sounds great, to bad my wife won't go for that on the wood floors!

 

[TazzBear]

The stiffer the plastic the better. The more flexable they are the more chemicals they leach. I used to use a powerhead in there but now run an air hose with a limewood airstone, have a Kent shut off, and use a powerhead to pump the water from there into my sump.. I decided to do this since I need RO water for makeup and Kalk additions, and I also have another tank to mix salt into when I need it. I to only mix the salt into the water a few hours before I need it. Both containers are 50 gallon potable water containers. Ask your wife how rubber rolling wheels on wood floors is going to damage them? Spilled water and dragging thing around on it would be worse. One bit of caution with this set up, make sure the pump is only a few inches below the water line and not at the bottom of your reservoir. That way if the pump gets stuck in the on mode it will only pump a few gallons into the tank. I have 250 gallons of reef systems to maintain so a few gallons of fresh RO water can easily be absorbed. I leave the heater and airline running continously.

 

[jbf16falcon]

I use the heavy duty 44 gallon Rubber Maid Gray trash cans with the locking lids. I think they ran about 30 something dollas each at Home Depot or Lowes. One I use to store my RO/DI water and the other to mix my salt water for water changes in. I put the salt in the water on Fridays before going to bed, throw a power head pump in the trash can to do my mixing, then when I feel like it on Sat. I do the water change. I store both RO/DI water an the RO/DI salt water for up to a month at a time with no problems other than having to throw the powerhead back in to stir up the salt sediment at the bottom of the can before using it. Most of the people I know say to mix the saltwater up 24 hours before doing the water change, that gives solution time to stabilize ionically etc.