Water quality

[Sage269]

I am having a water quality issue that I am not understanding. In my outside bog I have a tub with probably 12 gallons of water in it. I started out using distilled water. It evaporates around 1 gallon a day. I have several pots, water hyacinth and lots of waterborne Utricularias. In the last several months I have seen the ppm of the water go up around 1 to 2 a month. This is what I was expecting.

Indoor terrarium setup. 40 gal breeder tank, 6 gal of water. I have just in the last 2 days added 1 pot. The bottom 3 inches of this pot is LFS. I have been using this as a seedling chamber so 14 hours of light and nothing in contact with the water. I originally had a used chiller hooked up to this setup and saw the water quality go from 0.5 ppm to about 40 ppm in a month. I have disconnected the chiller and the pump is off. The water was removed and the tank wiped clean. Fresh water was put into the tank. After 2 weeks I started to see some green in the water. The water was 7 ppm. Now another two weeks and it is siting at around 14 ppm.

My thoughts were that distilled water and light would not grow any algae and if it did it would soon run out of stuff in the water to grow with. Apparently there is something wrong with my thinking. Anyone can explain to me what I am doing wrong? I do have a UV filter that could kill the algae, but I want to understand what the system is doing and why before I add anything else. Also would the UV filter keep the ppm of the water down? I don't want to have to drain and refill this thing every month! The water is to be used as temperature regulation and for the rain system.

Thanks.

 

[adnedarn]

The TDS needs to come from somewhere (even air I've heard claimed before). Pure water has an ability to over time pull minerals from anything that has minerals to give be it mineral build up on the tank, on a heater being used to regulate water temperature, drain off from plants being watered in the tank (or rained on and through the pot), whatever. I don't know at what TDS algae will not grow (or if that's even a thing) algae (at least when discussing a pool) is most often from organics, often phosphates are discussed. A UV filter will not lower the TDS (TDS is total disolved solids which are the measurement of biotic and anti-biotic organisms or impurities present in a sample of water. These could be any kind of minerals such as calcium, potassium, and magnesium, hydrogen sulphide, metals such as iron and these cannot be removed by using a UV filter which is just light. Being that less TDS are showing up this time makes me think whatever the minerals are coming from are becoming depleated and may continue to slow their introduction to your water.

 

[Sage269]

The reason for less TDS is the fact that I removed the Chiller.

Here is a list for reasons for algae taken from this thread:

What is the relationship between nitrate and algae

www.tropicalfishkeeping.com

Reasons for algae:
Undetectable ammonia
Low, or unstable CO2
Too much light for the ferts and CO2 available
Lack of NPK+traces

Interesting thread. I was worried that the UV filter breaks the cells of the algae and it would then break down to ammonia. This then would break down to nitrates.
I am thinking that higher levels of nitrates would not be a good thing, Yes?

Current plan of attack is that I have put in a light blocking floor to reduce the light to the algae. It was actually getting fairly soupy. I have turned on the pump to get water flow. Hopefully this will filter out some of the algae and reduce reassurance. I went to a hydroponics store and purchased Hypochlorous acid 0.028%. My understanding is this is about the most aggressive inexpensive method to clean the chiller. This should strip all minerals and sterilize the chiller. I will run this for a few days in a bucket of water. The Hydrogen peroxide that I had tried using was 3% purchased at the pharmacy. I will buy 67% Hydrogen peroxide and run that for a few days. Then I will do a complete water change in the system and see what happens. Fortunately I am still setting up a new system and I don't currently have any plants depending on it yet.

Thanks for your input and I will update this if anyone says that they are finding this interesting.

Thanks all.

 

[Sage269]

I will also run the chiller in a separate system with distilled water to verify that I am not getting a TDS buildup from it before installing it in the target system.